“Samuel Smith was the best part of thirty before anyone told him he was a wage-slave.” With opening sentence of Theme with Variations, G. E. Trevelyan tells her readers they’re not in typical British women’s middlebrow territory anymore. This is not a book about tea parties or sitting rooms: this is book simmering with anger about how society entraps its people. If Helen Ashton hadn’t taken the title with her own novel a year before, Trevelyan might well have called it People in Cages, for she presents us with three specimens, each trapped in its own cage. The bars are made of economic circumstances, class prejudices, social mores, fear, and, yes, simple bad luck, but they rule out any possibility of escape and freedom as effectively as those made of steel.
Samuel Smith is a working man, working since the age of eleven, and happy to have a secure place as a mover with a London haulage company. Married to a good woman, he’s content with his lot, happy to enjoy a pint at weekend with the lads down at the Green Anchor. When he ruptures himself lifting a marble table, however, his lot becomes frighteningly precarious, all too dependent on his employer’s good will and solvency. His age and injury keep him out of the Great War, but as times get hard in the late Twenties, his situation grows more tenuous. And then he finds that his old circle of chums is becoming transformed into a group of resentful and desperate men prepared to take violent measures to express their anger with poverty and unemployment.
Frances Jones is a fairly dim eighteen year-old girl who agrees to marry an older dentist, a man named Garstin, who takes a shine for her. Garstin sets her up in a new house in a new development on the outskirts of London, so new that there isn’t even a paved road in front, and leaves her there, isolated and alone. Having got the wooing and romancing part over, his demands on her are few: have dinner ready, keep the house clean, be pretty and silent on rare social occasions. Frances, on the other hand, has few emotional or practical resources to bring to her cause, and so she sits, day after day, having little to do other than phone for groceries and read movie magazines and romance novels. “I’m going to get out and do something,” she tells herself. “Somethink oughter be done.” Instead, the years roll by, Garstin grows even less interested in her, and she begins to suffer what we would now recognize as agoraphobia.
Perhaps saddest of Trevelyan’s three trapped specimens is Evie Robinson, a bright girl held back by her family’s mutual enabling society. Evie’s younger sister, Maisie, suffers from some unnamed disability — something physical but also somewhat mental — that draws in all the family’s energies. Evie’s mother hovers at the edge of breakdown over Maisie’s daily crises. The mother’s dramas send father running to the solitude of his den. And they both look to Evie to take over the burden of caring for and amusing Maisie:
“Must give a had with your sister, you know …”
“Can’t run about like the rest of you children and all that …”
“Your mother gets done-up …”
“Up to all of us to lend a hand.”
He bent down to light a match at the dining-room fire and stood up again to draw on his pipe.
“That’s right, be a good girl. Don’t forget to shut the door behind you.”
Unlike Frances, however, Evie has the spunk to plan her escape: “Tell you what I’m going to do, soon’s I’m old enough I’m going to go away and do something. I’m going to have a job, like Lillian Smith’s sister.”
And she does, through a series of decisions beginning years ahead of reaching the age of employment, tricking her distracted parents into agreeing to her taking a secretarial track at school, working hard to reach the head of her class, gaining a spot as an office girl in a local business, cramming for the civil service exam. Her dream inspires her through the most difficult times:
Another eighteen months at home. But it wasn’t too long, after all, to revise her matric subjects, and then do the new ones after she got Muriel’s books in July. Because there was hardly any time to work at home now. Maisie was learning to walk with crutches. Round and round the room with Evie. And then she got tired and started to cry and had to be tucked up and read to. She was fifteen now, she oughtn’t to cry, it was just stupid, but what could you expect with everyone treating her like a kid. And of course her being so small and having a lisp made you feel she was younger than she was. And Mummy going on like that, as if she were a kid of ten. “Poor wee pet, Evie will play a game with Maisie. Evie will work the magic lantern so that Maisie’s only got to lie still and look. Does it give my little girlie a headache? Then Evie will read her a nice story, to make it go away. Oh, for goodness sake, Evie, you’ve always got something else to do when you’re wanted.”
But it was only eighteen months, only fifteen months, only a year. — And then I’m going to get out, out, I’m going to get out!
We can’t help but root for her to succeed. But the best bars are always the invisible ones. For all her practical preparations, Evie has failed to consider that the only way to emotionally escape from her family is to reject them completely. These are not people to made do with an occasional visit or postcard.
Theme with Variations has the narrative power of a vortex. Trevelyan draws us deeper and deeper into each character’s thoughts, showing how little things — a book thrown across a room, an item in the newspaper, one pint too many — can have the effect of cutting us off from options, from the sense of having control over our own lines, until all the escape routes seem to be cut off forever. I started reading it after dinner on Friday, stayed up till 2 A.M., and finished it by noon Saturday, and was haunted by its claustrophobic atmosphere for days after.
I have to link to WorldCat.org for Theme with Variations because there are literally no copies of this book currently for sale. I’m afraid I bought the last one, and there appear to be only six library copies worldwide. And so it may be destined to remain utterly unknown and neglected, like virtually all of G. E. Trevelyan’s work. But I won’t give up yet: look for posts on three more Trevelyan novels in the coming weeks.