Dave's Book Blog: "A View of the Harbour" by Elizabeth Taylor

Wednesday, 10 September 2025

"A View of the Harbour" by Elizabeth Taylor

A novel dissecting the relationships between the members of a community, a stiff-upper-lip English version of Trindadian Miguel Street by V S Naipaul, Welsh Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas or Californian Cannery Row by John Steinbeck. It is framed by the characters observing one another, often through windows, which are framed. But their observations are inevitably flawed, like Bertram, the retired naval officer and would-be painter, whose paintings never measure up to the vision he had in the first place.

The heart of the plot is a secret love affair. Beth Cazabon, an author, lives with her husband Robert, the local doctor, and her two children, Prudence, a strange and troubled teenager, a five-year-old Stevie. Next-door-neighbour Tory (Victoria) Foyle, a divorcee, is her best friend ... but she is also conducting a secret affair with Robert. Mrs Bracey, who owns the local shop, is paralysed and spends all day in bed looking out of the window, and bullying her daughter Millie who runs the shop and cares for her; the other daughter Ivy works at the pub. Bertram Hemingway, newly retired from the Royal navy and living on half-pay, flirts with Lily, widowed owner of the waxworks, and Tory; he also sits with Mrs Bracey.

Prudence discovers the affair between her father and Tory.

In terms of plot, the tension is provided by this affair and the question as to whether Beth will learn of it. But presiding over the village from her bed is paralysed Mrs Bracey a monumentally self-centred woman. She's more than just selfish, though she is very selfish. She doesn't exactly take the place of God, although she acts as judge, dealing retribution without mercy: “Mrs Bracey sat in judgment. Guilt she saw, treachery and deceit and self-indulgence. She did not see, as God might be expected to, their sensations of shame and horror.” (Ch 13) She isn't just solipsistic, although she believes that when she dies the world will end: “When I die it dies also, and then it might never have been.” (Ch 16) She actually thinks that God, like Maisie, is her servant: “Mrs Bracey ... had always been aware of the concentration of God upon her, an omnipotent God, vaguely, and yet, over small matters, still at her beck and call. When she wished Him to give her His attention she opened a little shutter in her soul ... He would receive her orders and listen to her explanations (taking them at face value), but at the same time could be excluded from any shameful thoughts ... When she shut God away she did not imagine Him turning his thoughts to any others of His flock. It was rather like giving a maid the afternoon off, except that she imagined Him mooning about, idle, restless, waiting.” (Ch 15) What a woman!

I think my favourite bit-part was the librarian who personally reads and censors the books in his care: “Murder he allowed; but not fornication. Childbirth (especially if the character died of it, but not pregnancy. Love might be supposed to be consummated as long as no one had any pleasure out of it.” (Ch 2)

My favourite funny moment is in chapter 14 when Lily thinks that a brothel is a soup-kitchen, presumably because it contains broth.

The whole thing is wonderfully character-driven. I enjoyed the fact that it avoids the class bias that so many books of that time display.

The prose is third person omniscient and in the past tense. It is quite 'proper' and one imagines Ms Taylor spoke BBC English. It is carefully constructed with little fat.

Selected quotes:

“Two days in this place and the tide creeps up, begins to wash against me, and I perceive dimly that there is no peace in life ... not until it is done with me for ever.” (Ch 1)
“The young imagine insults, magnify them, with great effort overcome them, or retaliate. A waste of emotion Bertram thought, forgetting how much emotion there is to spare.” (Ch 2)
“Smells of stew crept round the kitchen.” (Ch 2)
“I dreamt I was at her funeral and when we were in the church I suddenly noticed that the coffin lid was moving up and down very slightly.” (Ch 4)
“Writers are ruined people. As a person, you're done for. Everywhere you go, all you see and do, you are working up into something unreal, something to go on to paper.” (Ch 5)
“Mrs Bracey lent back with her face turned to the clock, but her eyes shut, for a watched clock never moves, she had long ago decided.” (Ch 5)
“Odd means someone who is left over when the rest are divided into pairs.” (Ch 6)
“Little boys have a peculiar smell, too, as if they have been clutching pennies in their hot hands all day.” (Ch 8)
“As soon as he stepped outside, tiredness and depression dropped over him like a damp cloak.” (Ch 9)
“She was weary of all the mothers of her acquaintance claiming sensitive and highly-strung children, no matter how phlegmatic, even bovine, they might be.” (Ch 10)
“Everything was round the wrong way. In the days when she had been a little girl, the horrors were in the story books ... and the outside world was cosy: now, the horrors were real, and, to compensate, the child's imagination must be soothed and cosseted with innocent bread-and-milk.” (Ch 12) Written in 1947 and perhaps even more relevant today with all the trigger warnings.
“The sunlight filled the room as if it were wine in a glass, flashed on the knives and forks, showed up the smeary windows.” (Ch 14)
“There is no need to look smug and knowing - like the Mona Lisa - or - or a lavatory-attendant.” (Ch 16) What a brilliant juxtaposition! And how knowing lavatory attendants must be!