Back in 2012, lots of us were excited when Corsair reprinted some hard-to-find Dodie Smith novels – and with lovely cover illustrations by Sara Mulvanny. I’d already read The Town in Bloom (borrowed in an older edition from the library), but I snapped it up along with The New Moon with the Old and It Ends With Revelations, and promptly never opened them again. But the intention was definitely always there, and I’m pleased to have finally read It Ends With Revelations (1967). The title comes from that famous line in Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance – one character says “The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden.” Another replies, “It ends with Revelations.” Which has always irritated me, because the final book of the Bible is called Revelation, not Revelations.
ANYWAY, to turn to this book, the main character is 34-year-old Jill Quentin. Her husband Miles is a well-respected theatre actor, and she has accompanied him to an English spa town to the opening of a play that looks unlikely to do very well. It has recently been a TV series, but the transferral to the stage is pretty weak for any number of reasons, and Miles won’t mind extricating himself from the whole thing in the likely event that it ends after a few weeks.
Before I go further with the plot – my favourite parts of this novel are all the theatre things. Dodie Smith was both a jobbing actress and a playwright at different times, and writes about the theatrical world from the inside in one of her autobiographies and in The Town in Bloom. Her knowledge of the theatre suffuses the first half of It Ends With Revelations, but is seen more from an outsider – Jill has no wish to be an actor, though would have enjoyed being a stage assistant or something. Smith is very good on the various feuds and triumphs of the rehearsal process, how lines are cut and rewritten, or scenes re-directed to put focus on a different actor. You can tell it’s a world she knows well. I loved slightly knowing, caustic things like this:
They tiptoed into the back of the stalls. On the stage, a working light of dazzling brilliance dangled into a roofless composite set, made up of a sitting room and a kitchen separated by a staircase leading up to a room which suggested a look-out for forest fires. The whole gave the impression of a giant toy badly put together, rather than a place where human beings could conceivably live.
While buying chocolates for the leading boy, Jill bumps into Geoffrey Thornton. He is the local MP, as well as being a lawyer, and they quickly form an affinity. He introduces her to his daughters, Robin and Kit, on the cusp of adulthood. They are extremely self-possessed and take an instant liking to Jill – before long, they are all seeing each other, drinking hot chocolate in cafes, discussing their ‘dipsomaniac nymphomaniac’ mother with unusual candour, and sharing their tastes and interests. Perhaps my favourite two pages in the novel are where the sisters discuss Ivy Compton-Burnett.
“I almost like her because she writes about families,” said Robin. “But she doesn’t tell one enough about their backgrounds, what the houses are like, what the women wear. And though everyone’s always eating, we’re never allowed to know what they eat.”
“Well, who wants to know what anyone eats?” said Kit impatiently. “And she does say quite a bit about backgrounds. Sometimes there are cracks in a wall, or an overgrown creeper, or the rich people have cushions. One can do the rest from imagination.”
It’s totally irrelevant to the plot, and I imagine most modern editors would cut it, but I loved it so much.
The plot of the second half gets more complex, and it’s hard to write about it without giving spoilers – suffice to say that the lives of the Quentins and the Thorntons becomes increasingly entangled. There are, indeed, revelations. And among these are themes that are surprisingly modern for the 1960s, and discussed with a range of viewpoints. And, of course, anything surprisingly modern in 1967 will necessarily feel quite dated now. There are certainly passages that wouldn’t be printed today. And the debate rages on about what that means for reprints.
I really enjoyed It Ends With Revelations chiefly for the theatrical setting, but the second half worked for me too – because the revelations and twists say more about character than shocking plot, and they explain various things that were a bit mysterious in the first half. It’s a well-structured novel and pretty satisfying, give or take a few improbable relationships and decisions. I particularly enjoyed Kit and Robin, and would have liked even more from them – Smith is so good at girls of this age, as I Capture the Castle proves.
Better late than never, and I remain glad that Corsair made these lesser-known novels available to a wider audience.
his 1987 book was translated from Norwegian by Don Bartlett in 2013, which is when I think I got it as a review copy. Well, here I am, almost a decade later I’ve read all 118 pages of it. There seems to be some disagreement about whether this is a novella or a series of short stories – it’s kind of both, in the way that Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book is. Arvid Jansen is an eight-year-old boy in the 1960s, living with his family on the outskirts of Oslo, with a scathing older sister, a worrying mother, and a father who never stops speaking about ‘before the war’. There is also a grandfather, who dies in one of the first chapters/stories – a brilliant portrait of a young child’s mingled grief and indifference, scared of things changing but not really in mourning, and trying with inadequate words to convey all he is experiencing but not really comprehending.
This was Dodie Smith’s last novel, written when she was in her 80s, and it is quite a departure from her earlier work. While I Capture the Castle might feature the heroine in a bath when she first encounters the hero, nobody would describe Smith’s most famous work as a thriller. And that is what The Girl from the Candle-Lit Bath is at least trying to be.
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