Book description
Following his appearance in
The Unspeakable Skipton
, Matthew Pryar returns as the hero of Pamela Hansford Johnson's novel,
Night and Silence, Who is Here?
On any count, Pryar is a memorable character, and his experiences as a
Visiting Fellow of Cobb, a liberal arts college in New Hampshire, U.
S.A., will delight all who appreciate satirical comedy and brilliantly
entertaining writing. Pryar arrives at Cobb to assume his Visiting
Fellowship in a mood of expectant complacency. He expects to spend a
comfortable, fruitful year completing his long-deferred monograph on the
work of the celebrated and awful poetess Dorothy Merlin and to be mildly
lionized in the process. He reckons without the nightmare quality of the
domestic arrangements, the profusion and variety of the eccentricities
of his colleagues and the unheralded and unwanted descent of the poetess
herself. The complexities of the situation are considerable and they are
compounded by Pryar's newly-born ambition to abandon belles-lettres in
favour of college administration.
Pamela Hansford Johnson, as one would expect, handles her narrative and
her marvellous cast of characters with such dexterity and wit that this
New Hampshire winter story has all the pace and gaiety of Carnival in
high summer.
Pamela Hansford Johnson wrote 27 novels across genres as diverse as
romance, comedy and tragedy. An incredibly readable and literary author,
who deserves to be rediscovered by a new generation, Bello has brought
18 of Johnson's books back into print. Pamela Hansford Johnson was
born in 1912 and gained recognition with her first novel, This Bed Thy
Centre, published in 1935. She wrote 27 novels. Her themes centred on
the moral responsibility of the individual in their personal and social
relations. The fictional genres she used ranged from romantic comedy
(Night and Silence, Who Is Here) and high comedy (The Unspeakable
Skipton) to tragedy (The Holiday Friend) and the psychological study of
cruelty (An Error of Judgement). Her last novel, A Bonfire, was
published in the year of her death, 1981. She was a critic as well as a
novelist and wrote books on Thomas Wolfe and Ivy Compton-Burnett; Six
Proust Reconstructions (1958) confirmed her reputation as a leading
Proustian scholar. She also wrote a play, Corinth House (1954), a work
of social criticism arising out of the Moors Trial, On Iniquity (1967),
and a book of essays, Important to Me (1974). She received honorary
degrees from six universities and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature. She was awarded the C. B.E. in 1975. Pamela Hansford
Johnson, who had two children by her first marriage with journalist
Gordon Neil Stewart, later married C. P. Snow. Their son Philip was born
in 1952.
