"Georgy Girl" by Margaret Forster

This little known book became more famous as a film (starring Lynn Redgrave as Georgy and Alan Bates as Jos with James Mason as Mr James and the gorgeous Charlotte Rampling as Meredith) and even more famous as a song by the Seekers.

It is sSet in the early to mid 1960s: the Beatles are mentioned but abortion still seems illegal. Georgy is abig girl who thinbks herself ugly; at 28 she has never had a boyfriend while her flatmate, manipulative Meredith has many, the latest being Jos. Mr James, who employs Georgy's parents as valet and cook and who, being childless, has put Georgy through boarding school, seemss to be the only person to truly appreciate the inner Georgy: he offers her a contract as his mistress (six months, then one months notice). At the same time Meredith tells Jos that she is pregnant and Jos marries her to stop her having an abortion (though Meredith reveals she has already 'destroyed' two previous pregnancies by Jos. At this point Jos and Georgy start having sex. Then Meredith has the baby.

An interesting variation on the love triangle, with an original if slightly predictable conclusion.

The style is very typical of its time; both it and the social milieu described seem to belong more to the 1950s than the 1960s. The prose is fascinatingly staccato. In terms of plot, the turning points (Jos and Georgy having love and Meredith having the baby followed by the first row between Jos and Georgy) are bunched up between the 44% and 48% mark, just before half way. The final act begins at about the 70% mark.

Creative writers are told to beware of 'headhopping': jumping from one person's point of view to another's but Forster moves from character to character with abandon (as does Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway when the stream of consciousness is passed from character to character with the aplomb of a tag team wrestler).

Some great moments:

• "If he and Meredith went for a meal, it was to stoke themselves up before bed; if they went to a club of some kind and danced, it was a limbering up process before the real business of the evening began. Even a picture would be carefully chosen to act as an aphrodisiac. Without the end product, none of these pastimes was attractive." (C 2)
• "There is no point at all in us getting married when I know nothing about you except things I don't like." (C 2)
• "His whole life had been dedicated to a mere man and not someone unique." (C 3)
• "You don't go around in this life showing your feelings. It does no bloody good at all. You pretend even to yourself and then you feel better." (C 3)
• "The flesh around it hung in slack folds like a sail from which the wind has suddenly been taken away." (C 4)
• "It just wasn't true  that to have and to lose, or give up, was worse than never having at all." (C 8)

An interesting read. January 2020; 170 pages