Still Life by Sarah Winman
When this novel was discussed at book group, there was overwhelming love for it. This chimes with the majority of criticisms and reader comments. And yet, the very things that are charming and appealing about this book and that swept me along as I read it were the very things that actually made me very cross. I’ll take you more into my mixed-up reaction to this book in a moment but first the synopsis.
The book starts in Tuscany a short time before the end of the second world war where we are introduced to Ulysses, who is to be our main protagonist and companion over the following decades. He is an intelligent and sensitive working-class soldier with a kind and open nature. As his army unit work their way through Italy, he meets Miss Evelyn Skinner, a sixty something art historian and possible spy working to secure from destruction the wonderful artistic riches of the renaissance. Now, a quick digression – as a working-class teenager with no culture, I was lucky enough to be taken on a package tour sea and sun holiday to Italy. I was even luckier, although I didn’t think it at the time, when my parents decided to break up our beach days with a long trip to Florence. I may have grumbled at the early start, long bus journey and force-fed culture but when we visited the Uffizi I was literally blinded by the brilliant colours and beauty of the art on display. Whilst I didn’t immediately become an avid consumer of the high arts, I do think the door to an aesthetic sensibility was opened a crack and I can still picture my younger self wide-eyed at the wonderful sights of the city. Now the point of this digression is that a similar awakening happens in Ulysses, especially as he discusses the importance of the connection between art and real life with Evelyn and his commanding officer, one of the finest men he has ever met. The power of these experiences remains lurking in his background when the war ends and he returns to his patch of East End London in those war-ravaged, post conflict years.
Winman concisely and skilfully sketches the tight community of characters centred around ‘The Stoat and Parrot’, the pub where Ulysses returns to work behind the bar – Colin, the grumpy landlord, whose sarcasm can’t hide his kindness and disappointed romantic nature; and Old Cressy, another kindly soul with a belief in the redemptive power of nature and an organic relationship with objects and machinery which means he can fix virtually anything. Ulysses also returns to his wife, Peg, the beautiful and tempestuous singer at the pub with whom he has one of those strange relationships that will never cohere and yet never end. Their marriage was a practical, financial act before he went off to fight but now that he has returned the first thing they do is divorce. Peg’s usual whirl of emotions has been stirred by the end of her brief but bedazzling love affair with an American soldier. He leaves her with a hopeful longing for his return over the ensuing decades and a child. Ulysses, decent and loving, acts as a surrogate father for The Kid.
And then the novel takes a sharp shift as Ulysses inherits a Tuscan villa, the result of a typical act of kindness by him during the war. Enticed by the beauty and possibility he had tasted only a few years previously, he persuades Peg to let him take along The Kid, and Old Cressy also joins for one last adventure. In Italy, this strange family begin a new life renting out part of the villa to tourists. Ulysses resumes his dead father’s craft of globe making – a hint here of the emotional manipulation that made me angry, but I’ll hold my horses for a while on that.
Eventually, through the 1950s to the 1980s more and more characters from England, the Italian village community and Ulysses’ past are drawn into this new world that he has created. Together they create a beautiful, caring, secure new life, a still life that values the everyday and shows that each of the characters still has a life of wonder and happiness. That’s the part of this book that is easy to love. It has an optimistic view of human nature and a belief that whether someone considers themselves different or an outsider there is always the possibility to create a loving family just as Ulysses does. The core of this book’s philosophy and charm is summed up by Ulysses towards the end of this book when he looks around at his friends and thinks “You’d want to be with them…. You’d want to be part of them.”
This sense that anyone can create their own family and that most people are decent and kind is not the only case for the defence of this book – and actually there’s no need for a defence as my opinion is the outlier on its merits. In addition, Winman moves confidently around the characters’ different perspectives to create a group of distinctive, well-rounded people. Yes, many of them are different often because of their sexuality, sometimes because of their uncomfortable fit with life’s realities and conventions, but in the new world Ulysses and they create, there is always understanding and acceptance.
As I say, it is this rich characterisation, the evocation of the novel’s two distinct milieu and the sunny optimism of the characters’ lives that made this a smile-filled breeze to read. And that should be enough – but for me it isn’t. We have one bad guy (white, English and mean in every way) who brings some darkness to Peg’s life but that is in the margins of this story. Then there’s some typical teenage angst for The Kid - we’ve all been there. And that’s about it. None of the positivity and good feelings seem to have been properly secured – there’s not enough contrasting darkness to give the glorious moments proper impact. It’s as if I could eat and drink whatever I liked, never exercise or show restraint and yet still live a healthy life all the way to my hundredth birthday – a lovely thought but not real life.
That caveat, of course, tells you more about me than the book. I could try to bolster my case by mentioning the frankly annoying parrot and other magic realism touches; but, again, I know I am on dodgy ground because many people like this genre. It also strikes me that this book ticks all the boxes for fair-minded, kind, anti-Brexiteers: it creates a world in the heart of Europe where everyone gets on in a charmingly, idiosyncratic manner, and there is no prejudice or disharmony in contrast to broken Britain from which the characters escape. Wishful thinking but, like a lovely sweet treat, its sugar rush was soon forgotten … by me.
Assuming, however, that you are less of a grump than me, I suggest you pay more attention to the rest of my book group and the flood of positive critical reviews.