Books on change, two of them

May contain plot spoilers. These are good books so you could read them and come back later? No? So be it, step with me if you will:

In 1947, Mollie Panter-Downes, a successful columnist and novelist aged 41 wrote a fictional account of one summer’s day in the life of Laura (38), wife of Stephen and mother to Victoria. In 2023, Joanne Harris (59), a bestselling author and social media persona wrote a psychological thriller and magic realism novel about a woman - Bernie Moon - going through menopause and regaining subtle magical powers of mind reading and control that she had slowly developed as a child but lost at puberty. I thoroughly enjoyed these two books about change. In One Fine Day, Panter-Downes beautifully describes the smells, sounds and poetry of nature.

These wonders of nature are put nicely in contrast with the punishing dark frustration felt by Laura who used to be, in the words of Stephen, a tall and funny girl who was now stooped and grey and always tired. Indeed Laura is a disappointment to herself and in particular to her colonel father and ambitious mother who do not understand why she would have married Stephen when she could have done so much better. It hasn’t helped that World War II took away the young men and women who used to be in domestic service and who now are either dead or moving into the cities to work in factories, go to the cinema and party hard while Laura has to do their jobs and rely on limited help from surly old men and women who put in a few hours and observe that Laura really isn’t very good at domestic tasks. The small tragedy of the single day covered in the novel is that both Stephen and Laura want to experience simple joys like a walk to the top of the hill and seeing the view to the sea but they are too busy with daily routines and pressures to speak about it. The story is full of strong women and weak men, but each are given a voice and portrayed with some sympathy and understanding.

The happiest man in the book is the man known simply as the gypsy who lives on his own in a cabin up the hill, needs little and keeps only a bunch of dogs for company. He could work and maybe he will. He will think about it he says. Laura knows he will not actually do it. I loved this book. It is beautifully written and it deals with good people who try their best but who are ill equipped to face a changing world and who do not have the courage to even speak among themselves about how to perhaps make a better life. Stephen thinks that they should maybe move abroad but he knows he will not leave England. Laura is exhausted and out of her depth and does not know what to do about Stephen. Both of them want to see the view from the top of the hill and, here is the plot spoiler, Laura manages it.

There are similarities with Broken Light. Bernie Moon is married to Martin who is always jittery and frustrated. She too is unhappy, has no friends and rarely sees her son who is secretly gay but tells nobody. The change here is the menopause, not the societal changes brought about by taking a generation of domestic servants and farm workers and turning them into cannon fodder, factory workers, cinema goers and newspaper readers. The curse that is the newspaper in One Fine Day is replicated by social media in Broken Light. However, the sympathetic view of weak men is entirely absent here. Though I enjoyed the beautifully crafted narrative, I do wonder if any male writer would have seriously considered writing a narrative where all the male characters were good but mixed weak and strong while all the women were feeble, hypocritical and mean persons with violence ever ready to spring forward. There is one good and possibly strong man in Broken Light. He is a bartender and he is gone after half a page never to appear again.

Bernie Moon becomes able not only to read minds but also to change them subtly if unpredictably. She does this reluctantly and for the best of intentions and she does help avert a lot of violence and abuse from men. However, a common theme of Broken Light and One Fine Day is the disappointment that Laura and Bernie are met with from their mothers. The maternal angle here is that they really need to get their act together, be fitter, look better, dress with more care and stop moaning. Join a gym, make that husband of yours pay for a cook and a maid. However, to Panter-Downes, both Stephen and Laura deserve our sympathy and they do try their best to conform to what they imagine their partner and the outside world expect of them. To Harris, Bernie Moon needs magical menopausal powers to break the spell of men and to be able to cultivate strong female friendships. However both books seem to agree that conforming to expectations is not the direct way to happiness. The lusty carefree, selfish female dogs, unfaithful wives and foul mouthed runners have by far the best day.

Rewrite Broken Light with the men in the women’s roles and vice versa and you may find a thing or two unsettling about the narrative. By contrast, put a tired, grey and ineffectual Stephen in Laura’s place and have Laura do the unhappy commute to a London office and I think you will find One Fine Day equally plausible and persuasive.