For a genre rooted in the 19th century, the country house novel has proved amazingly durable. Tariq Goddard has set his latest book in a North Yorkshire house called The Heights, “once an Arts and Crafts cottage, now arguably the most attractive dwelling in the county”. It is quite a departure for a writer best known for his novels about men in wartime, such as his 2002 debut Homage to a Firing Squad, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread first novel prize.
Nature and Necessity opens in the 1970s and ends roughly around the present day. The lady of the house is Petula Montague, who married into money in the form of her second husband, Noah. She has two children from her previous marriage whom she alternately dominates and neglects; Evita eventually runs away and becomes a drug-addled hippy, whereas Jasper, or Jazzy as he is known, stays on the family estate as a disgruntled labourer, “like a cross between Arthur Scargill and Bill Sikes”. Petula lavishes all her attention on her daughter with Noah, Regan (the King Lear reference is entirely relevant). She encourages people to refer to them as “the sisters”, and we are told “there had never been a point in her life where she considered her daughter’s property or affairs separate from her own”.
This is a novel about women, with the men largely cowed or absent. “Men were like children to Petula: it was not good to let them make decisions for themselves ... ” Yet her position is not secure; she is reliant on her husband, and as in a good 19th-century novel, the source of his wealth – “factory farms in the Philippines” – is not something she wants to be widely known.
It quickly becomes apparent that Nature and Necessity isn’t such a departure for Goddard, because Petula approaches her family and social life as warfare: “Having [Evita] and Jasper at large was like having to fight America and Russia at the same time.” With her plots against family, friends and neighbours, and battles with local tradesmen, Petula is reminiscent of one of PG Wodehouse’s aunts, or Mapp and Lucia from EF Benson’s novels.
But though he can be very funny, Goddard takes Petula’s battles to their logical conclusions. People get hurt, and not just emotionally. There is class war as well as interfamily conflict. Goddard peppers the text with references to contemporary events such as the miners’ strike. There’s more than a little bit of Thatcher in Petula. She says at one point: “Life isn’t fair on those of us whose backbones are made of self-pity.”
Where Goddard excels is in splicing country house novel conventions with contemporary mores. Regan’s debutante ball turns into a drug-fuelled debauch with perhaps the funniest description of taking ecstasy for the first time that I’ve ever read. In fact, few people write about intoxication as well as Goddard. Sometimes the humour is rather broad. The local town is called Shatby, Petula’s first husband is called Anycock and there is an apple press called Genocider. But the author also comes out with elegant aphoristic lines such as his description of Aunt Royce, Noah’s sister: “As with many spinsters of her generation she kept her spirits up with hobbies, the Mail on Sunday, gardening and regular interference in the lives of younger relatives.”
Goddard can do tenderness as well as humour. The best scenes are moments of thwarted intimacy, such as when Evita comes home strung out on heroin and her mother looks after her in the attic – the Jane Eyre parallels are made explicit. There is no reconciliation: “doing things had always been preferable to forming emotional connections” for Petula.
Evita fails in her mother’s eyes because she’s not a good actor: “Evita lacked the guile and strength to convince the world she was right, which, in Petula’s book, was not different to being wrong.” The Heights is a stage set with Petula as director, producer and leading lady. She surrounds herself with actors and, obsessed with appearances, lets terrible things happen to her children. Petula sucks the life out of those around and then discards them when she is bored.
Nature and Necessity is not perfect, by any means; at nearly 600 pages, it could have done with a prune. But there’s a ferocious energy here that will keep you reading through to the bitter end. Goddard has reinvigorated the country house novel and in Petula Montague he has created a great new monster of English fiction.
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