Death of a style of life

A Cautious Approach, by Stanley Middleton, Hutchinson (Random House); £18.99

A CAUTIOUS APPROACH is the 45th and final novel by Stanley Middleton, who won the 1974 Booker Prize with Holiday and died last year aged 88. As in many earlier works, his setting is Beechnall, a fictitious quiet town in middle England, populated by characters who are for the most part middle-aged, educated individuals of the English middle classes.

George Taylor was an English teacher until ill health and a recommendation of fresh air caused him to retrain as a postman. Taking his constitutional one Christmas morning, he makes the acquaintance of Andrew Barron who, with the proviso “I’m heterosexual”, invites him home. Here he meets Mirabel, Andrew’s intriguing ex-fiancée, and a very tentative attraction is sparked; one with the potential to destabilise George’s life.

Middleton’s art lies in his close-focus depiction of ordinary, unheroic people and in the subtle texture of their daily lives. However, much of his novel will seem anachronistic to contemporary readers. Tesco exists, but food is often referred to as “comestibles”. Though we are clearly in the computer age, his main characters formally invite each other to tea by posting handwritten cards. The world of Beechnall is old-fashioned and tweedy, but hardly alien.

Middleton’s treatment of his characters and their exchanges is another matter. Otherwise impeccably well-mannered people, freshly introduced, show a fondness for asking extremely intrusive questions and for coolly revealing their innermost feelings about their failed marriages or estrangements from their immediate family. The effect is jarring, but interesting.

These are complex human beings; their past woes have not made them any less irritable or distant, but instead bring them up against their own and others’ inadequacies — and occasionally, their strengths.

“Both by the shape of my work and my use of language I try constantly to interfere with the reader, to rest him as well as violently assault him,” Middleton said of his style. One experimental trademark is that of embedding a dialogue, or even an entire flashback scene, within one of these outwardly nonchalant conversations. Thus, we find a successful sculptor reliving for an audience of three the first time he cowed his physically abusive father — but in the third person and seemingly complete with full scenic backdrop, props and stage directions. Quite apart from the veritable thickets of inverted commas this can produce, it is a deliberate challenge to the reader.

The unusual edginess of this style has won Middleton praise over the years and is not quite the stumbling-block it may at first seem; where this novel flounders, ultimately, is in its emotional frigidity. Even given such decorum, a little desire should simmer below the surface, but sadly, it simmers not. The single love scene is almost arctic. Scenes of grief are sterile. Those who prefer their fiction dispassionate, cultured and stylistically accomplished — admirers of AS Byatt and Ian McEwan included — should find Middleton’s last offering stimulating. For everyone else: approach with caution.