Enormous significance can be teased out of the tiniest details, as certain writers well knew: the metaphorical “little bit (two inches wide) of ivory” provided Jane Austen with ample material, as she worked through the microscopic to reach macroscopic conclusions, and William Blake could see “a world in a grain of sand”. Bernardine Bishop, too, in this posthumously published novel, turns her attention on the miniature – a single street – yet through a small geographical terrain she considers the largest matters of life and death. Indeed, the question recurring throughout this slim novel is: “What is a life?”
Bishop resumed writing fiction after a 50-year hiatus on the day after she was told that she had cancer. She produced three novels: Unexpected Lessons in Love, Hidden Knowledge and finally The Street. In a moving afterword, she describes the experience: “It was as if I had taken my life back and it was up to me to do something different with it.” Her last novel is infused with a sense of urgency, and written in prose pared to the bone, as if not wanting to waste a word, as if knowing that time is a precious resource – a lesson the novel’s characters must discover the hard way. The novel’s ending is abrupt, appearing to be suddenly cut short, making for a flawed, rough diamond of a book.
The novel teems with outsiders as she x-rays the lives of the street’s inhabitants and shows that, despite physical proximity, there are gaping emotional gulfs. We meet elderly husband and wife Anne and Eric, whose lives are unsettled by the arrival of their grandson, John, who suffers profound homesickness and attempts to forge a sense of identity independent of his family: “He could have a world that was not their world, and he could survive.” Another couple on the street, Sally and Beale, are reduced to doing the crossword together in order to feel close. Bishop explores not only community spirit, but “the pain of exclusion”. The novel is most visceral when analysing the corrosive fear and jealousy curdling through relationships, such as when Sally goes to spy on Beale at the pub to check he isn’t having an affair. Bishop was the youngest witness in the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960, and proves unafraid to challenge convention in her fiction, too. Throughout, she excels in excavating single moments to powerfully show the profound in the prosaic.
The Street is published by Sceptre (£8.99). Click here to order it for £6.99
