The Lives of One’s Parents: Review of a Novel by Rosalind Brackenbury, “The Third Swimmer”

(John Daniel: McKinleyville, Cal., 2016)

Review by Malcolm Willison

Any reader anticipating a compelling, well-written, insightful novel already knows to seek out any of the five novels already published by Rosalind Brackenbury   A short but compelling book, this sixth of her novels is divided into two parts, a before and an after. The first part elicits how two emotionally disparate and differently situated young people in London meet, and how, because of another, hidden emotional tie of hers, Olivia hesitates in choosing her path with Tom, who has just lost his once-promising architectural job and joined the British Army. As England slips into World War II and the bombing of London begins, her uncertainties and unhappiness are reflected in the drama and misery of every Briton’s then unsettled life and loyalties, with all the attendant individual and social privations and tragedies. But their hasty marriage turns out not to have resolved the personal problems and relationship of these two.

The second part of the novel is longer, spinning us forward seven years, past the couple’s recollected wartime miseries and then their own burgeoning and distracting parenthood in the excruciatingly slow recovery and nagging deprivations following the war. These are all refracted in their own flashbacks during a trip driving across post-war France, a first attempt at a real honeymoon. At last they are alone together, without the children for once, at Tom’s irritable insistence. They are still chilled by their surroundings and the war’s still-evident depradations, and by each other, despite the ever-warmer sun as they drive south. The eagerness of the French to welcome them as wartime collaborators against the Germans clearly suggests a more vital sense of life and relationships, especially after they arrive at the Mediterranean fishing village of Cassis (which is also a sharp and even medicinal aperitif).

But despite the tentative thaw in their relationship, the couple themselves are blocked in their reconciliation by their challengingly different class origins and experiences, by Olivia’s muted emotional outlook and Tom’s disappointed expectations from life and his wife. That is, until Tom’s brave, unexpected, and almost fatal response to a seaside crisis brings out all of Olivia’s latent determination, strength, and decisiveness. His near-drowning puts Tom, “the Third Swimmer,” in a whole new relationship with the people of the village, and with his wife, who demands his rescue and takes over his recovery. This is the crux of the book. But the true conclusion is reached only after Olivia feels compelled to admit what she has tried to conceal throughout their marriage, namely her prior emotional life and its consequences. All marriages are likely to face some disturbing revelation at least once, sooner or later.

Reaching the novel’s dénoument is therefore a difficult process for these two protagonists, beautifully evoked by Brackenbury’s prose, which underlines the miseries of the coming of war, and then the long, cold, and agonizingly long recovery that follows. A superb and much-published poet, Brackenbury conjures the shifting situations of Olivia and Tom, as well as of the society around them, with deft description and a canny use of metaphor in their daily behavior and their surroundings, especially with the invasive cold and the color blue. There are revealing insights into people and their relationships, as well as several participants’ uncanny paranormal subconscious revelations. Besides one Proustian moment and a few terse Hemingwayesque passages, and even a touch of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” there are repeated references to St.-Exupéry and his death—quite likely a suicide–his airplane having descended gradually into the deceptively tranquil sea off Cassis on a quiet day toward the end of the war, observed back then by the mariner from Cassis who now befriends Olivia and Tom.

Brackenbury’s style is distinctly English, appropriately reflecting the couple’s reticence and correctness, especially that of Olivia, whose point of view gives us insight into her muted responses to the changes and conundrums around–and in—her. Yet Brackenbury deftly reveals how Olivia finds at last her strength and her fellow-feeling to confront and overcome her self-limitations, asserting her agency in the world beyond her children and for dealing with Tom. He, as a traditional if iconoclastic Englishman, is more external and less reflective. But of course he too has past crises and current disappointments to resolve. The two of them are still dealing with the aftereffects of war’s contradictions of peacetime morality, wartime’s lies, deceptions, and secrets, unnerving disasters and escapes, and what war makes people, civilians and soldiers alike, do: the brave and the despicable saving and taking each other’s lives and potentially their own in the end.   But the Frenchman who befriends both of them offers an empathetic path for reconstructIng trust, and love, highlighting the couple’s cumulative psychic dramas at the end of the novel.

In this imaginative reconstruction Brackenbury has in fact delved into her own parents’ story, as we all do after our parents’ deaths. Parents leave enduring mysteries for their children: she too must imagine answers to what it was like for them when they were young and what happened to them and their relationships then and thereafter. The crises and resolutions are fully earned, and Brackenbury again merits the high praise her other novels have so deservedly received.

[livemarket market_name="KONK Life LiveMarket" limit=3 category=“” show_signup=0 show_more=0]