A Review of 'The Corner That Held Them' by Sylvia Townsend-Warner

Why did I read this book about nuns by a communist lesbian and why did I like it?

I can answer one of those questions, the other I can "explore"

First one is easy; Emma Gregory

I didn't read it, I listened to it. I live alone and only Audible can distract me from the cats and the voices which I certainly hope are talking behind the wall on the neighbours side of my semi-detached house.

This usually means an unending selection of Warhammer books (after finishing the Horus Heresy I couldn't kick the habit). Near continual audibling has given me an ear for audiobook readers like a neurotic Picardy farmers taste for wine. It’s a strange and subtle job, few single individuals who aren't the writer can affect the quality of a story in the same way and to the same extent; the vile made tolerable, the medium given uplifted and the good given wings. Likewise a bad narrator, or just a poor fit, can grind a tale down into the black earth.

Of the art and science of narration, that may be an investigation for another time. For now; few narrators can handle Warhammer Fiction, only a handful of women ever did any and one in particular very strongly stood out as being exceptionally good at it. Emma Gregory; the 'Watchers of the Throne' series, the voice of Jeneta Krole in 'Saturnine' and seriously punching up a mid-range book in 'Neferata: Dominion of Bones'.

Looking for more of an Emma Gregory kick I wend wandering in Audible. Most of the other books looked boring and this one 'The Corner that Held Them' was newly recorded and seemed interesting.



WHAT IS THIS BOOK

It is the story of a convent in England, from its founding in the mid 12th century, for perhaps two hundred years, following it through several generations of nuns, dipping in and out of the story or the continuity of their shared lives.

Nothing I've read seems quite like it but the think closest in tone and structure might be '100 Years of Solitude, and the sci fi rip-off of that - which I forget the name of. 'Corner' doesn't have any magical realism but in the same "story of the place through the people" deal and mild absurdism mixed with muted non-dramatic tragedy and the strange patternings of life, it fits there best.




HOW IT IS THAT I KIND OF NEARLY DIDN'T LIKE IT ALMOST

What is the story in a nutshell? - there nearly isn't one, or at least not one that can be summed up. It is nearly exactly a "slice of time". There are many dramas and mysteries, several deaths, even a murder, but its not a "dramatic" book. These things simply happen as part of the patterning of life. The murderer is never caught or brought to justice and the big "sleeping elephant" of the "plot" (the convent priest is a fake and was never ordained and so by church law none of his services are valid and all his confessions may be as well they never happened) also never comes to light. The individual stories mesh and roll against and through each other. So what is it about?

THE CROWD

Probably at some point you have looked out at a crowd of people and tried to hold within your mind the interior spaces within each of them, each one as deep as your own, with their own personal motivations and differing drives and dreams.

Inside they are like deep laden cargo vessels with black holds, or great wallowing airships carrying bric-a-brac and secret treasures, strange and echoing within - but they fleet and skip past each other like raindrops on a window, engaged on some great mutual business which brings them into contact here and there, brushing against each other in these tenuous social handshakes and half-act plays.

Then probably you give up even trying to imagine it and go about your day. It’s too much!

The book is about that really, a polyscale vision from the deep interiority of peoples lives, up through their social webs, their buildings, hierarchies, landscape, economy and culture, all as one, held, as the eye of a writer, like a hawks eye, can stay hovering, open and focused upon a great land which they pull back and forth before the, seeing at once the mountains and the dreams.




THE PURSE

Economics - really a huge amount of the structure and "story" and motivating drive for many characters in the second half comes from debt, going into it, servicing it and trying to claim it.

In the first half of the book one of the head nuns gets a vision that she should build a spire on the convent. This goes horribly wrong, becoming a massive money sink, the work lasting decades longer than expected. But - its a sunk cost, you would have to be a truly radical leader to be the nun who says "yes that spire we've been working on since the plague - fuck that thing lets leave it unfinished". So the spire is eventually, laboriously, completed, and then the convent has to cover the debt they incurred building it, which is an economic pressure on it from that day forth, and the convent gets much of its money from debts or rents which come along with its nuns as dowries, so they need to collect the debt to pay the debt.

Almost none of the nuns really know this is going on. Or at least they all "know" about it, in the same way you sort of "know" about the national debt, but they don't fully understand how much of their day to day life, the decisions of leadership, the structure of their lives, what they do and why and how they do it, is ultimately decided by this question of money and debt, a debt which many of them weren't around to incur and may not be around for when its paid off.

We know. And the Prioress's of the convent who can do accounting, and the more intelligent archbishops, all know, but the ladies in it are just in it.

Likewise, the business of managing the church, the simple logistics and accounting of it, the human management, the balancing of competency against utility against political necessity, which makes up the personal world of the Bishops and priests who periodically visit the convent, all of this, strangely, lead me to an odd sympathy with these worldly religious women and men. People of a church I don't belong to, and overwhelmingly concerned with the parts of that church which are not even about religion. The "other stuff", the maintenance and bureaucracy, and that hugely politically and morally compromised as well. There are no grand idealistic reformers, just people trying hard to stop things from going completely to shit, and making lots of compromised decisions in limited circumstances. The middle-level bureaucrats, my natural enemies!

How can it be that I am lead into sympathy with such people? Is it because I can see inside their minds and see how little they have to work with in the world, because I can see through time and unlike them know both their future and past, in a vague way, so know how difficult their meta-circumstances are?



THE STRANGENESS OF FAITH

How it passes back and forth around and within people like weather, forming differently in each one, provoked strangely and by unexpected events. The convent priest who isn't really a full priest, starts an affair with a lay sister, and its this which sparks him into actual, deep religion. Another has a complex drama with rare Italian music and lepers which alters his soul somehow. One sister fares poorly with the others, suffers deep depression and a total loss of meaning, then while praying to St Leonard, the saint of prisoners, the saint strikes her on the head and says "Go be an Anchoress!" This becomes her driving dream, and frees her from her depression and malaise. We, and the Priest, and the Prioress, know that almost certainly some other Nun just knocked her on the back of her head because she was irritating them - but the Priest rationalises it as being "essentially" the Saint. Later, long after the Nun in question has learned the truth and her dream of being an Anchoress has disappeared, another Nun becomes obsessed with it and begins to make it her driving cause, so the first nun has to work out whether, or how, to keep the secret of the knock on the back of the head.

THE MYSTERY OF PROMOTION - FATE IS INEXORABLE

Every Prioress earnestly wishes to arrange for some sane and capable successor, to manage the accounts and generally keep things calm between the nuns, (and hopefully to be pretty faithful).

This almost never happens. One appointed successor dies strangely in a spire-based accident/possible suicide. One nun is appointed to the role because nobody thought she would get it, felt bad for her, and so voted for her out of pity so she didn't end up with zero votes. Along with a split vote this put her 1 vote ahead and bam, new prioress there you go.

PEOPLE NOT UNDERSTANDING EACH OTHER

Townsend-Warner is capable of a deep interiority (of the kind which, I, for instance, can't manage, especially about the normal or mundane texture of life’s drama). These fluid and deep dives from mind to mind, show us the point of view of one soul looking at another, how enmeshed they are in their own private worlds, even when together, how in some ways inexplicable they are to one another.

It’s in "Jokers-Third" Perspective. Giving us deep enough dives into each soul to show us what drives and moves them, more even than they themselves sometimes know, before flitting like a fly to observe their interactions with another person, with quite a different soul - and we know more about both than either, so their attempts to understand each other, and communicate, are sometimes tragic, or comic and sometimes accidentally-blessed.

this fits with the modernist structure of the book - small stories ending in the middle, others disappearing into nothing, low things becoming great and great becoming small.




MODERNISM AND FEMENISM

Don't know if I've written about this before but can't remember exactly so will assume that I haven't and say it again if I have. There's a strange unacknowledged alliance nascent between modernism and feminism. men, especially the type we tell stories about, tend to have more story-shaped lives; largely about one or two interest, with all of the activity dedicated towards that, big rises, deep falls etc. You can cut them down pretty strongly to fit them in a book or film and still retain the general shape and theme of the life.

Women’s lives tend to be more about a lot of little things, spread out more in time, built from a greater number of connections between and across difference schema of life and more about those connections. Less vertiginous ascents and hubris-driven falls. Less stark shape and so when you cut it down to make it art, harder to retain the sense of it. 

Modernism, or "cubist" fiction about women is one interesting response to it because you can build a whole from fragments, skipping across space, time and schema, without having to fight the structure of the text or piece. Though the only other one I can think of off hand is Greta Gerwigs 'Little Women'.




HOW I CAME TO LIKE IT, OR FELL UNDER ITS SPELL

I forgot most of the specifics of most of the nuns even while reading and have definitely forgotten their names now. For a book which it basically a web of nuns you would think that a bad thing, and certainly, the core action of the book; the domestic lives of nuns who can't even leave the convent much and their relationships - is not exactly high Patrick style. And added to that that it is deliberately non dramatic!

Where's the DRIVE!  Where's the TENSION!?

There isn't any, or isn't much, just small lives and usually small dramas as they are lived.
This is the key and that is that the book as a whole stayed with me, like a dream or a strange memory, a stone of endless fascination, which one can turn over again and again, with its unanswered questions.

Not to mention the particularity of the history, specificity of the landscapes, the clothing, the meals the animals, the villagers conversations about a legendary history of Viking raiders which must have taken place only a few hundred years ago - this book drew from a deep well of slowly-accumulated knowledge.

Perhaps it is the strangeness of its empathy, its refracted, sorrowful, slightly grieving and slightly impish empathy, for all these fractured, damaged souls in an unfair and uncertain world, none of whom really know what the hell they are doing, at least 50 per cent or more of which are honestly trying to do something like the right thing up to 50 per cent of the time, (which isn't bad really). And that combined with a view of their world and environment which is at once cold, clear, but without contempt or the verminous wrathful self-righteous loathing, or simple blank incomprehension to faith of lives other than their own which I associate with the worst parts of the left - usually their curse is that they gain the global systematic view but in return have to chip off a bit of their soul and throw it away, it’s rare to find someone who has both the mind of a systems analyst and also their heart in their chest.