Review: 3-book omnibus: Some Tame Gazelle / Excellent Women / Jane and Prudence
Gaby Meares
This review is for Some Tame Gazelle.
Written in 1950, Some Tame Gazelle is Barbara Pym’s first novel. She introduces us to the Misses Bede, Harriet and Belinda who are unapologetic about their chosen lives as spinsters. Harriet asks rhetorically, ‘Who would change a comfortable life of spinsterhood in a country parish, for the unknown trials of matrimony?’ Their world revolves around the church (Church of England, of course, not Roman!) and it’s calendar, not to mention its curates.
Belinda fell in love with the insufferable Archdeacon over thirty years ago, and ‘not having found anyone to replace him since, had naturally got into the habit of loving him, though with the years her passion had mellowed into a comfortable feeling, more like the cosiness of a winter evening by the fire than the uncertain rapture of a spring morning’.
Pym’s gift is her eye for the beauty in the everyday; in her ability to put into words precisely how the mundane can be luminous: ‘Belinda’s eyes filled with tears and she experienced one of those sudden moments of joy that sometimes come to us in the middle of an ordinary day.’
Why should books only be about the ‘big’ stories - the grand passions, set in exotic locations, involving beautiful people? Pym celebrates our lives; her readers’ lives. She illuminates the thoughts we have all had, and shows them to be worthy, and full of pathos. As Belinda considers the purchase of some clerical grey wool to knit a jumper for her ‘dearest’ Archdeacon, she then resigns herself to knitting one for herself instead, because ‘when we grow older we lack the fine courage of youth, and even an ordinary task like making a pullover for somebody we love or used to love seems too dangerous to be undertaken’.
However, Some Tame Gazelle is not only contemplating the poignant lives of its characters, it’s also very wry and funny. When a famous librarian visits, it’s pointed out that he is ‘a great connoisseur [of wine]. It seems right that a librarian should be. Good wine and old books seem to go together.’
There are moments in this book that felt immensely personal for me, they resonated strongly. When Belinda takes to her bed with a chill, she luxuriates in the guilty pleasure, not even feeling like reading, but rather ‘she was quite enjoying her illness now that she felt a little better and could allow her thoughts to wander at random in the past and future without the consciousness that she ought to be more profitably employed.’ Only Barbara Pym would think to include this moment in a novel; so personal and yet so universal.
Do not approach a Barbara Pym novel with expectations of dramatic plot devices, or over-the-top characters, for you will be disappointed. However, if you want to spend time with characters with real hearts and souls, then pull up a chair, pour your favourite tipple, and enjoy - you’re in for a treat.