Temples of Delight by Barbara Trapido

We all say it often, but it really is true that our bookshelves can hold hidden gems just waiting to be discovered. Back in 2009, Bloomsbury kindly sent me all six of Barbara Trapido novels that had recently reprinted (a seventh novel would be published the next year). I read Brother of the More Famous Jack and liked it a lot – then in 2019 I read Noah’s Ark and didn’t like it much. At this rate I could be reading Trapido for the rest of my life – but I have now read my third, Temples of Delight (1990) and it is my favourite so far. It’s really something special.

Temples of Delight is a coming-of-age novel of sorts, following Alice Pilling from her childhood into early adulthood. She is a shy, clever girl, made nervous by her stutter and by not being widely loved by her classmates. There is a stubborn, determined streak in her – she certainly won’t conform to the mould of the girls around her, though that would perhaps make her life easier. And this only develops when she meets Jem, a nice girl in her class who is a whirlwind of a personality. Her stories of her life, her parents, her relatives are all extraordinary, eccentric and vivid – her parents meeting over a wall after a snowball fight, for example, or her sister Patch meeting Modigliani while shading in her sketch of Michelangelo’s David‘s unmentionable parts. Even her name is a curio – she is called Veronica Bernadette, but nicknamed Jem after P.G. Wodehouse’s ‘jem-sengwiches’.

The opening line says ‘Jem was a joyful mystery to Alice’. She is a joyful mystery to the reader too. It’s very hard to pull off the idiosyncratic, ebullient character, but Jem is a complete success. We observe her with the same fascination that Alice does. For a girl who has lived an ordinary life, with ordinary, kindly parents, Jem is a revelation. It is thrilling to Alice that Jem should even pay her attention.

Alice loved the way Jem talked, even when she couldn’t understand half of what Jem said. It was infectious the way Jem grooved on words.

The opening section of the novel is a wonderful ode to the power of female friendships, even when they are founded on an enigma. I was reminded of Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore and, to a lesser extent, Swing Time by Zadie Smith.

Jem is such a vivid, captivating, brilliant creation that we miss her as much as Alice when, one day, she disappears from Alice’s life. She announces that she must leave immediately, on the next train.

“I’ll write to you,” Jem said again. “Alice, you will always be my dearest friend.”

“What?” Alice called, because she couldn’t catch the words and Jem was getting further away.

“I’ll never forget you,” Jem called out, but the sound of her voice was drowned in a roar of gathering speed.

With Jem gone, Alice has to concentrate on her studies – and she exceeds expectations by getting a place at Oxford University. As a long-term resident of Oxford (now Oxfordshire), I enjoyed the section of the novel set there – which focuses little on Alice’s studying of Classics and more on the strange family household where she rents a room, and the confident Roland who becomes her boyfriend.

I don’t want to say too much about the plot – unlike, it must be said, the blurb on the back of my edition. But it continues with different people and places intervening into Alice’s life, and throughout it all she thinks often and deeply about Jem. She still has with her the dramatic, oddly capable childhood novel that Jem wrote in school exercise books. She refers often to what Jem might think or do in any given situation – there is a feeling that Alice is simply biding time until she meets Jem again. Despite the brevity of their friendship, there is a sense that she is a light guiding the rest of Alice’s life. It is testament to the power of Trapido’s writing that Jem’s light shines bright enough to illumine many pages and chapters after her mysterious exit.

Generally, I am most impressed by novels that are short and spare – that make a big impression in a low number of pages. Every now and then, I am bowled over by a book that does the opposite. Trapido is never in a rush. There are chapters devoted to characters who, in the scheme of things, don’t matter hugely. We delve particularly deeply into the life of schoolmate Flora and her miserly, unkind father and loyally downtrodden mother – indeed, some of the scenes with them are the most memorable and dramatic. Does Flora need to be in Temples of Delight? Not really, but it is all part of Trapido’s leisurely, expansive way of writing this novel. A review on the front says ‘fizzes along at a cracking pace’, but I think the opposite is true. Trapido envelopes us in a world and makes it whole. We move steadily through it, never wanting to increase the pace, taking it all in eagerly.

Alongside this world-building, and her perfectly drawn characters, Trapido is very funny. Her prose is often dry – I noted down ‘The school was not one which attracted bookish girls on the whole, and there was no one in the third form who appeared athirst for a greater understanding of the English Revolution.’ She is witty, often unsparing of her characters, in that mould of delightfully eccentric prose writers like Muriel Spark, Beryl Bainbridge, Jane Bowles. But she is a little more grounded than they are, a little more accepting of hope and optimism.

I will say that the final third of the novel was not quite as good, in my eyes. I wrote in my review of Noah’s Ark that ‘Trapido writes about sex in a jarring way, with sudden and momentary explicitness’ – that isn’t quite so true, or quite so jarring, in Temples of Delight, but I did find that, tonally, the final sections weren’t quite as successful as the rest. But it doesn’t diminish my love for this book, or the likelihood of finding it on my best books of 2023. I’ve found it hard to do the novel justice. I loved it so much.

It turns out I’ve been reading Trapido’s novels in order, which wasn’t necessarily intentional, and it also turns out that her next book, Juggling, is a sequel. And then her next, The Travelling Hornplayer, combines characters from these books with those from Brother of the More Famous Jack. Will I read them while I remember enough about the characters to recognise the connections? Possibly not, at this rate, but I know that one character I won’t forget is Jem.