Muntaha: A Village Novel Book

Rebecca West's 1922 second novel is much longer than her wonderful first novel; The Return of the Soldier. It is a complex, densely written novel with some breath-taking descriptions of Scottish and English landscape. It is also - I can see from other reviews - one capable of dividing opinion. I suspect it is that highly descriptive dense writing that some readers dislike, while others may find the highly dramatic melodrama of the end of the novel at odds with what had come before it.

"Ellen thought herself a wonderful new sort of woman who was going to be just like a man; she would have been surprised if she had known how many of stern-browed ambitions, how much of her virile swagger of life, were not the invention of her own soul, but had been suggested to her by an old woman who liked to pretend her daughter was a son."

In the early years of the twentieth century, Ellen Melville is a seventeen year old typist at a legal office. She is also a suffragette, naively innocent Ellen is unaware of her own beauty and the effect it has on others. Ellen finds herself judged and treated as an object by the men for whom she works, but has inherited a great capacity for love from her impoverished mother with whom she lives in a tiny dark house. Ellen can't help but be dissatisfied with her life, she wants to experience all that life has to offer, she is at times outspoken, but still with a touching childishness about her which allows her to leap about her beloved Pentland hills in joy. When she meets client Richard Yaverland one day at work, she meets an older worldlier man, a successful man who has travelled widely, with liberal political views he seems to represent much of what Ellen seeks.
In Ellen and her simple good mother, Richard finds something he seeks - and is soon determined to marry Ellen. Before their marriage the couple travel back to Richard's home to meet his mother of whom Richard has spoken to Ellen a good deal.

"'Her body would imprison her in soft places. She would be allowed no adventures other than love, no achievements other than birth.'

Richard Yaverland comes from Essex, where he lived with his mother Marion, Marion even accompanied him on some of his expeditions abroad and the two are extraordinarily close. Richard is illegitimate, the result of his mother's love affair with the local squire. Marion's story - of how she was judged and ill used by the small community in which she lived, is told more than half way into the novel - yet it is the memory of this strong and controversial mother and her obsessive like love for her eldest son that pervades this novel. Marion has another son, one born following her somewhat forced marriage to an utterly odious man who offered to save her reputation when she found herself pregnant. This younger son; Roger, is a pitiful figure that the reader wants to sympathise with, and I did, however West has made his older, more selfish, more golden brother the more likeable character - although he is far from flawless. Roger's childhood was sacrificed so that Marion could live the solitary life she desired with Richard. It is Roger, not Richard who is Marion's guilt made flesh. The ending is gloriously melodramatic - it is at odds with the first part of the novel but I loved it.

"Every mother is a judge who sentences the children for the sins of the father."

The judge of the title then is everyone, each character and certainly the reader themselves. Marion is a very harsh judge of herself, she has reason to be, and although the reader is able to sympathise with this strong and unusual woman, they can't condone her actions. The judge is a fascinating exploration on what early nineteenth century society perceives as sin and the treatment of those who stray from the excepted path.