Lease of Life by Frank Baker #1954Club

Few things in life represent the triumph of hope over experience as much as my continued attempts to find an equal to Miss Hargreaves among Frank Baker’s other output. My attempts have ranged from actually-quite-good to extremely-forgettable, usually settling somewhere around mediocre – with Miss Hargreaves appearing as an extravagant anomaly.

But the 1954 Club is another great opportunity for me to take another chance – and this time with Lease of Life, a novel that I’ve had for the best part of 20 years. Here is the opening paragraph:

On a winter afternoon the last light of a dying sun fell slowly through the great west window of Gilchester Cathedral. Far away, from the world beyond the choir screen, the organist was playing the introduction to Purcell’s anthem, ‘Rejoice in the Lord’. As the descending C major scale passage dropped, then rose again, so did the light fall lower down the window, revealing the glory of its colours. Seeing the falling light, hearing the falling music, a middle-aged man who was the solitary occupant of the darkening nave, was curiously moved. The light must go, the music must end: this was inevitable. He was not saddened by the thought; it was like a new experience, like falling in love again and remembering from the passage of many years the heart’s elation when a girl smiled at you. Lawrence Hearne smiled now when he thought of this; he was fifty-two, far enough away from youth to begin to revalue it. So, he thought, I am in love. And what am I in love with? There was only one word which could answer the question. He was in love with life.

Lawrence Hearne is a vicar who has never come to much notice outside of his family – loving wife and daughter, the latter of whom shares his love for music, and may be a talented pianist. As the novel opens, this love of life is particularly painful. Because he is told by a doctor that he has not long to live – the sort of illness that will go unnoticed by those around him, but which will take him suddenly in the next few months. He decides not to tell his wife and daughter or, indeed, anybody else.

Meanwhile, there is a funny scene where discussion is under way for a new Dean. The role comes with more money, privilege, and notice. And Rev. Lawrence is identified as a possible candidate – so long as he does well at a sermon he is giving for schoolboys at the cathedral soon. Hearne himself has no idea that he is even in the running, or that the sermon is going to have any undue attention.

Here is a little snippet of Robert Donat delivering part of that sermon, in a film adaptation that was released in the same year the novel was published, 1954, with a screenplay apparently written by none other than Eric Ambler.

I really enjoyed Lease of Life, mostly because of Lawrence Hearne. He reminded me rather of Anthony Trollope’s Septimus Harding, and not just because of his profession. While he will never be in the same league as dear Septimus, one of the greatest creations of literature in my opinion, he has the same gentleness, humility, and determination to seek and do the right thing.

In Lease of Life, this coalesces around his sermon – which veers from an interpretation of Scripture to being something a little more avant-garde. I suspect the views expressed are Baker’s own, and they would be considered mild in 2022, but apparently rather disruptive in 1954. I did have some trouble believing that, even in 1954, anybody’s sermon would grab popular attention and scandal in quite the way that Hearne’s does. Particularly since it seems inoffensive, if a little flighty.

It is typical of Baker’s non-Miss-Hargreaves novels that the ideas are required to carry more weight than perhaps they can. By which I mean, he puts ideas down in place in plot, and the novel is more about examining and discussing them then it is about narrative and characters. Ironically, the reason that Lease of Life works better than most of his writing is that the characters still feel vital and enjoyable (albeit least of all when they are required to discuss those Ideas). If he’d just made Lease of Life about a vicar, his wife, and their daughter – maybe dealing with his diagnosis, maybe pursuing their own aims in ignorance of his fate – then I think it would have been a much more successful novel. Certainly more likely to have lasting affection, and welcome re-reads, then a novel in which Baker tries to form his own form of theology.

So, if I were ranking Baker’s novels, this would be quite high up the list. But perhaps not for the reasons Baker hoped. I wish he had been less philosophically ambitious in his writing, and happier to use his undeniable gift for character and dialogue in a simpler manner.