Thank you for some additional 1956 Club reviews since I updated the page recently – I will make sure the list is fully updated at the end of the week. And will read all the reviews too! This week has rather got away with me, but I always manage to read them in the end – and what a variety of books people have been reading.
I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else reading Thin Ice, though. It’s my third Compton Mackenzie novel, and the other two (Poor Relations and Buttercups and Daisies) both of which ended up being among the favourite books I read in those respective years. Since then, I’ve been buying a lot of his novels, and I was aware that he wrote in various different styles. The first two I read were very funny, bordering on farce. Thin Ice is… not.
It’s narrated by a man called George and is about the life of his close, long-term friend Henry Fortescue, from 1896 to 1941 – when, as we learn on the first page, Fortescue dies. They were friends as youths and continued to be as Henry became an MP, with an eye on potentially becoming prime minister. The only thing that might stand in his way is if he ‘indulges in his indulgence’ – which is being gay. This is a secret for only a few dozen pages, and even during that time it is a secret only from George – the reader has worked it out almost instantly. Henry states early on that he will never marry any woman, and that he intends to either be celibate or throw caution to the wind completely – and this is where the title of the novel comes from:
”You’re pacing this orchard with me, Geegee, trying to look sympathetic, and only occasionally peering nervously round over your shoulder to see that nobody is within earshot, but how can you be sympathetic? You can’t possibly understand my emotions. I can assure you that I shouldn’t be inflicting them on you now if I were not determined to suppress them henchforth. That’s why I’m telling you. Edward Carstairs would jeer at that. All he would ask is that I should be discreet. And that’s what I was intending to be until I realised that for me discretion was impossible. It had to be complete self-denial, or complete surrender. And walking about for ever on thin ice does not appeal to me.”
It’s certainly an interesting theme for the 1956 Club, being published more than a decade before homosexuality would become legal in the UK. Sadly, it’s not a very interesting novel in any other way.
Because it covers such a long period, and gives weight to each year, the chapters hare through a lot of time at breakneck speed. Details of the day are thrown in, often political, many of which didn’t mean much to me but do give a good sense of historical accuracy. Doubtless the 1956 reader enjoyed the references that took them back to their own younger days. But this speeding through years gives Thin Ice a feeling of being constantly in flux, and never letting us bed in to any details of the characters. The narrator is largely there to relay events, but we expect a bit more of a personality from the main character’s best friend. And Henry himself is drawn with a bit more complexity, but we don’t get enough time to dwell on any of it.
Mackenzie isn’t writing in humorous mode here, and I certainly missed that. It all felt a bit colourless and repetitive. Bland. Perhaps it wouldn’t have done if he’d picked a few years and focused more on characters and relationship between them. The scope of the novel left it without any depth.
A shame to end 1956 Club with a bit of a dud, and perhaps it wouldn’t feel quite so much a dud if I didn’t love Mackenzie’s comic fiction as much as I do.