A charmed circle Book

Anna Kavan published six novels between 1929 and 1937 under her own married name, Helen Ferguson. Realist and lower-keyed, they barely portend the striking surrealist/experimental work she would later publish after breakdown and name change, despite the name Anna Kavan having been drawn directly from a character of this period. Published when she was just 28, A Charmed Circle is her earliest work.

There's a certain kind of literary contrivance that I find terribly aggravating, where characters find themselves entirely trapped in authorial machinations designed to drive them towards some pre-conceived ends, whether via their own assigned natures or by the coincidences and congruences demanded by the story. I associate this sort of thing, in its annoying aspects, with 19th century melodrama and any era of satire. Of course, any complaint with with this sort of shoe-horning of characters and events is part of a larger dissatisfaction with -- or at least awareness of -- the constructed narrative. Of course, I'm not especially into the naturalist alternatives to contrived plotting, and there are many, many extremely contrived stories that I love. I suppose it all matters what ends we're contriving towards. If it is an interesting concept that warrants the effort, I'm all for it. But if we're contriving towards lame satiric gags, or forcing a point that couldn't be made without forcing, or trying to bring a "realistic" drama to its tragic ends, I'm going to become irritated. Specifically in the last case, forcing a contrived tragedy actually works the opposite of its intended effect on me: usually my empathy shuts off as soon as I notice the attempt to manipulate the story (and my own emotions) and any pathos is lost.

All of which is an explanation of why Anna Kavan's realist writing of the 20s is a rather dicey proposition for me. Not even halfway through A Charmed Circle, I had a pretty good idea of where we were being directed, mostly via the inexorable natures programmed into our sibling protagonists and their stifling family home. Fortunately, Kavan seems less interested here in high melodrama, and heads off the kinds of cheap explosions another might apply in favor of a precise calibration and observation of relative psychological states between the principle cast. Which, while interesting, serves to remind the Kavan-familiar reader of the ways in which her later work codes its psychology directly into its description and storytelling, typically avoiding such overt explanation. On the other hand (and excitingly for the Kavan-obsessive) her later finesse in conveying shadings of psychology with landscape and weather is already in effect alongside her more overt techniques, foreshadowing the glaciers to come.

Still, my interest in early Kavan is entirely informed by late Kavan. In its own right, this is a decent, subdued psychological novel, told in precise, confident language, of toxic familial relations and the prison of home (especially for the independent-minded young women that Kavan must have been). But see, it's inseparable from my pre-existing fascination. On its own, I'm afraid, this probably just wouldn't be all that notable or memorable. But, as I said, there was much, much more to come. Here's a bit that looks towards that most clearly, perhaps:

In time, the builders came. They set up houses of a different kind; neat, ugly little boxes strung together in rows. The rows, too, strung together. Surprisingly, they extended and met, forming mean streets that devoured the unresisting land. Fields were eaten away almost overnight. People went for their yearly holidays and returned four short weeks later to find the landscape strangely altered. Everywhere was an alien and unwelcome activity.