"At the Jerusalem" by Paul Bailey

A compassionate portrait of old age, written almost entirely in dialogue. It won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1968. Its author went on to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize in both 1977 and 1986.

Old Mrs Gadny, still grieving the death of her daughter, goes to live with her stepson and his wife and children. Tensions multiply and she is placed, still depressed, in an old people’s home.

It's a well-paced story with some interestingly nuanced characters. It is written mostly in dialogue. Actions are also recorded but there is virtually no description. In this it reminded me of the work of Ivy Compton-Burnett. However, the dialogue in this novel is much more vernacular than the formal and grammatically correct dialogue that ICB employs. Furthermore, there is a substantial amount of interior monologue from the principal character, Mrs Gadny, interspersed with the dialogue. Here is a typical extract:

"Nurse Barrow watched her eat.
‘Have they missed me?’
‘The ladies?’
- Ladies!
‘Ladies! Have they missed me?’"

Note the extreme brevity of the paragraphs which are often a single sentence long, the preponderance of dialogue, the simplicity of the described action and the inclusion of a single line, in this case a single word, representing  Mrs Gadny's thoughts.  

This gives the novel a bare-bones, minimalist feel. It makes it distinctive. I need to read more novels by Bailey to judge whether this accurately represents his style. 

It is very much of its time. There are only ten ladies in the home and several nurses, a matron and a cook, but they all sleep together in the ward. Some of the ladies used to be ‘in service’. One of them never,  learned to read, this is also true of some of Mrs Gadny's relatives. Some of the patients object, in bluntly racist terms, to being cared for by a black nurse. The phrase ‘Jew-boy’ is used and the word ‘cripples’.

Of course it is sad, since it charts Mrs Gadny's decline. She herself feels that she has been thrown away like "trash". Nevertheless, there are a number of moments of wryly observational humour to lighten the mood.

Selected quotes:

Page numbers refer to the Head of Zeus (2020) edition

• “As crafty as a pox doctors clerk.” (1, p51)
• “This hospital’s in Lambeth, where they've done it. They have a machine there, it's the only one of its kind; just for stomachs. People come from all over the world to take advantage. All over the world ... Dulwich - everywhere.” (1, p 70)
• “This is what you come to: you live for seventy years and you find one night you're stuck in a room, in a chair, and your body’s beneath you, waiting for the chill to strike it, till your eyes see only black and no sound to remind you. You've memories of rooms and faces and all manner of things but they go as quickly as they come. How long before she was nothing? Years?” (3: p208)

November 2024; 216 pages

First published in 1967

This edition published by Head of Zeus

Other, more or less contemporary novels about old people reviewed in this blog include Memento Mori (1959) by Muriel Spark, and Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971) by Elizabeth Taylor. Both these books focus on people from a rather higher social bracket; in the Spark book the protagonists live independently and Mrs Palfrey lives in a 'private hotel'. 

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God