All posts tagged Elizabeth

Queen Lucia by E.F. Benson (1920)

The hours of the morning between breakfast and lunch were the time which the inhabitants of Riseholme chiefly devoted to spying on each other.
(Chapter 4)

‘Any news?’ he asked.
(Riseholme’s catchphrase, Chapter 9)

Georgie explained the absence of his sisters and the advent of an atrocious dog.
‘He’s very fierce,’ he said, ‘but he likes jam.’
(Chapter 5)

When an irremediable annoyance has absolutely occurred, the only possible thing for a decent person to do is to take it as lightly as possible.
(Chapter 6)

‘Come into my house instantly, and we’ll drink vermouth. Vermouth always makes me brilliant unless it makes me idiotic, but we’ll hope for the best.’
(High-spirited Olga, Chapter 11)

E.F. Benson

‘Queen Lucia’ is a 1920 comic novel written by Edward Frederick (E.F.) Benson. Born in 1867, Benson came from a very pukka family; when he was born, his father was headmaster of Wellington School (in Somerset) and went on to become the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was a prolific writer of popular comic fiction, with a side line in ghost stories. His breakthrough novel was ‘Dodo’, back in 1893 when he was 26, a satire on the composer and militant suffragette, Ethel Smyth. But he is best remembered for the series of six Mapp and Lucia novels which began 27 years later.

Queen Lucia

‘Queen Lucia’ is the first of six novels in the popular Mapp and Lucia series depicting provincial, posh, snobbish ladies and their struggles for social dominance in their tiny village communities. It was Benson’s first popular hit since ‘Dodo’ a generation earlier and established a new subject and manner which he successfully mined for the rest of his career, in the six novels and two stories which make up the series.

The ‘queen’ in question is Emmeline Lucas, who thinks of herself as the social queen of the quaint Elizabethan village of Riseholme, a hotbed of pretentious would-be arts and culture enthusiasts. Symptomatic of her pretentious approach is the way she refers to herself, Emmeline Lucas, as Lucia and her husband Philip, a retired barrister, as Peppino.

Though Mrs Lucas’s parents had bestowed the name of Emmeline on her, it was not to be wondered at that she was always known among the more intimate of her subjects as Lucia, pronounced, of course, in the Italian mode – La Lucia, the wife of Lucas; and it was as ‘Lucia mia’ that her husband hailed her.

Lucia has a best friend, the foppish, forty-year old George ‘Georgie’ Pillson, her aide-de-camp, her ‘faithful lieutenant’ in the endless war for cultural supremacy of Riseholme:

Lucia put on the far-away look which she reserved for the masterpieces of music, and for Georgie’s hopeless devotion (p.265)

He dyes his hair, passes the time with embroidery or pastel drawing, and accompanies dear Lucia on her piano duets. While Lucia’s chief rival in these genteel conflicts is her ‘friend’, Daisy Quantock (husband, Robert), enthusiastic devotee of every passing fad.

Riseholme

This deliberately quaint little village has a high street, a duck pond, a pub – ‘that undoubtedly Elizabethan hostelry, the Ambermere Arms’ – and a village green where its inhabitants circulate every morning avid for gossip. When the story opens the undisputed monarch of this little domain is Lucia.

Riseholme might perhaps according to the crude materialism of maps, be included in the kingdom of Great Britain, but in a more real and inward sense it formed a complete kingdom of its own, and its queen was undoubtedly Mrs Lucas, who ruled it with a secure autocracy pleasant to contemplate at a time when thrones were toppling, and imperial crowns whirling like dead leaves down the autumn winds.

Like everything else in the book, the self-obsession of Riseholme is extraordinarily exaggerated. Early on Lucia returns from a trip to London and when her husband asks about it, the resulting dialogue reveals that they really genuinely consider London a kind of hopeless backwater, compared to Riseholme, which is where true art and creativity and integrity flourish:

‘And how was London?’ he asked in the sort of tone in which he might have enquired after the health of a poor relation, who was not likely to recover. She smiled rather sadly.
‘Terrifically busy about nothing… I think this Riseholme life with its finish and its exquisiteness spoils one for other places. London is like a railway-junction: it has no true life of its own. There is no delicacy, no appreciation of fine shades. Individualism has no existence there; everyone gabbles together, gabbles and gobbles…’

Later on, when the classical singer Olga Bracely announces that she is buying a cottage in the village with the declaration that it is a charming ‘backwater’, Georgie believes she can only say such a thing because she hasn’t yet realised that Riseholme is the centre of the universe.

True, she had said that she was coming here because it was so ideally lazy a backwater, but Georgie did not take that seriously. She would soon see what Riseholme was when its life poured down in spate, whirling her punt along with it. (p.127)

And that is exactly what she comes to believe by the end of the novel:

‘Oh, it’s all so delicious!’ she said. ‘I never knew before how terribly interesting little things were. It’s all wildly exciting, and there are fifty things going on just as exciting. Is it all of you who take such a tremendous interest in them that makes them so absorbing, or is it that they are absorbing in themselves, and ordinary dull people, not Riseholmites, don’t see how exciting they are? Tommy Luton’s measles: the Quantocks’ secret: Elizabeth’s lover! And to think that I believed I was coming to a backwater.’ (p.259)

Gossip

The inhabitants of Riseholme live for gossip, are gluttonous for news. Every morning they circulate on the village green, bumping into each other and fiercely competitive to possess and impart the latest gossip in what Benson jocosely calls the village ‘parliaments’.

The hours of the morning between breakfast and lunch were the time which the inhabitants of Riseholme chiefly devoted to spying on each other. They went about from shop to shop on household businesses, occasionally making purchases which they carried away with them in little paper parcels with convenient loops of string, but the real object of these excursions was to see what everybody else was doing, and learn what fresh interests had sprung up like mushrooms during the night. (p.58)

And he who corners a piece of gossip (as Georgie often does), seethes with self-congratulation and happiness, and a glorious sense of superiority, and spends ages deciding who to share it with to maximum effect.

Georgie felt very much like a dog with a bone in his mouth, who only wants to get away from all the other dogs and discuss it quietly. It is safe to say that never in twenty-four hours had so many exciting things happened to him. He had ordered a toupée, he had been looked on with favour by a Guru, all Riseholme knew that he had had quite a long conversation with Lady Ambermere and nobody in Riseholme, except himself, knew that Olga Bracely was going to spend two nights here.

Lucia

Mrs Emmeline Lucas refers to herself as Lucia. She is a fantastic epitome of 1920s intellectual snobbery for whom speaking Italian is the quintessence of civilisation. She is obsessed by Beethoven, the first movement of whose Moonlight sonata she practices over and over again.

Lucia’s husband made his pile as a barrister in London. He is now retired and writes prose poems, is the author of two slim volumes, ‘Flotsam’ and ‘Jetsam’, printed:

not of course in the hard business-like establishment of London, but at ‘Ye Sign of ye Daffodil’, on the village green, where type was set up by hand, and very little, but that of the best, was printed.

Lucia considers herself responsible for turning Riseholme from a labourers’ village into a palace of culture. Her tea parties, performances on the pianoforte, her dinners, her tableaux featuring classical characters, are all legendary in the village.

Lucia lives in three cottages which she and Philip bought, knocked together, festooned with period features, and named ‘the Hurst’. Behind it is the Shakespeare Garden where only flowers mentioned in Shakespeare plays are grown. All the bedrooms are named after Shakespearian characters of plays, Hamlet, Othello, Midsummer Night’s Dream.

One of Lucia’s characteristics is her ‘silvery laugh’ with which, more often than not, she tries to laugh off yet another humiliation.

Queens, thrones and wars

The thing is that the metaphor of Lucia being queen of Riseholme is not a casual, peripheral joke. It is central to the book’s conception and the narrative abounds with metaphors of wars, campaigns, strategies, calls to arms and so on, from large events such as a garden party, right down to the individual cut and thrust of dialogue.

The competition for cultural supremacy is absolutely unremitting and colours all the thoughts of all the characters all the time. Eventually this comes to seem bizarre, almost surreal. Thus when the newcomer, Olga Bracely, threatens to become the new cultural supremo of the village, Lucia reacts:

Lucia had not determined on this declaration of war without anxious consideration. But it was quite obvious to her that the enemy was daily gaining strength, and therefore the sooner she came to open hostilities the better, for it was equally obvious to her mind that Olga was a pretender to the throne she had occupied for so long. It was time to mobilise, and she had first to state her views and her plan of campaign to the chief of her staff. (p.204)

You see how the entire thing is couched in military metaphors? They sprinkle the text:

Then with poor generalship, Lucia altered her tactics, and went up to the Village Green…

With the eye of the true general, he saw that he could most easily break the surrounding cordon by going off in the direction of Colonel Boucher…

By this time Georgie had got a tolerable inkling of the import of all this. It was not at present to be war; it was to be magnificent rivalry, a throwing down perhaps of a gauntlet, which none would venture to pick up. (p.165)

During dinner, according to Olga’s plan of campaign, the conversation was to be general, because she hated to have two conversations going on when only four people were present, since she found that she always wanted to join in the other one. (p.181)

Really it was rather magnificent, and it was war as well; of that there could not be the slightest doubt. (p.205)

The mock heroic

The entire thing is a peculiarly English, domestic example of the mock heroic. According to the Wikipedia article:

Mock-heroic or mock-epic works are typically satires or parodies that mock the elevated style of Classical stereotypes of heroes and heroic literature. Typically, mock-heroic works by either putting a fool in the role of the hero or painting trivial subjects in heroic style.

That is exactly what happens here. Every new nugget of village gossip, every plan for a tea party or dinner, even down to individual conversational gambits, are all described as if they’re campaigns from the Napoleonic wars, major battles complete with battle plans, strategies and tactics. Here’s a little exchange which epitomises the mock heroic use of war metaphors:

Mrs Quantock, still impotently rebelling, resorted to the most dire weapon in her armoury, namely, sarcasm.
‘Perhaps, darling Lucia,’ she said, ‘it would be well to ask my Guru if he has anything to say to your settlings. England is a free country still, even if you happen to have come from India.’
Lucia had a deadlier weapon than sarcasm, which was the apparent unconsciousness of there having been any. For it is no use plunging a dagger into your enemy’s heart, if it produces no effect whatever on him. (p.73)

In a couple of places Benson breaks cover, as it were, and actually cites the classics almost in the manner of Homer et al:

Her passion, like Hyperion’s, had lifted her upon her feet, and she stood there defying the whole of the advanced class, short and stout and wholly ridiculous… (p.137)

Her whole scheme flashed completely upon her, even as Athene sprang full-grown from the brain of Zeus. (p.213)

He waited rather hopefully for their return, for Peppino, he felt sure, was bored with this Achilles-attitude of sitting sulking in the tent. (p.242)

Gay and camp

Benson was gay though, necessarily in the society of his time, concealed it. But as homosexual art and practice have been more openly celebrated over recent decades, critics have more openly discussed the camp aspect of the novels. Camp is, in a sense, a variety of mock heroic. Classic camp makes mountains out of molehills, wildly over-reacts to the trivial, simply adores those new shoes, ear-rings etc, just loves that haircut, simply worships the new Madonna look etc.

This gay aspect of the book is most obvious in the character of the self-involved Georgie, ostensibly devoted to Queen Lucia while all the time bitchily conspiring against her, fussing about his hair and toupee, worrying about his precious heirlooms. Critics have, predictably, seen Georgie as a humorous self-portrait.

Georgie (he was Georgie or Mr Georgie, never Pillson to the whole of Riseholme) was not an obtrusively masculine sort of person. Such masculinity as he was possessed of was boyish rather than adult, and the most important ingredients in his nature were feminine. He had, in common with the rest of Riseholme, strong artistic tastes, and in addition to playing the piano, made charming little water-colour sketches, many of which he framed at his own expense and gave to friends, with slightly sentimental titles, neatly printed in gilt letters on the mount. ‘Golden Autumn Woodland’, ‘Bleak December’, ‘Yellow Daffodils’, ‘Roses of Summer’ were perhaps his most notable series…

On a broader view, it’s possible to argue that the preening middle-aged ladies who dominate the narrative – Lucia, Daisy Quantock – are more gay men than straight women. This is the view of my wife who’s loved these novels since she was a student and impressed me by saying she’d never believed Benson’s older ladies were women at all; that they always seemed, to her, obviously gay stereotypes.

This is a subject I’m not expert enough to judge, but am just noting this view.

Plot synopsis

The narrative consists of a series of farcical episodes in which the Lucia’s extravagant artistic snobbery and battle for cultural control of the little village is repeatedly called into question, eclipsed, re-established and so on. These episodes are:

Mrs Quantock’s Guru

Mrs Quantock is a creature of fads. As the novel begins she is at the tail end of a fad for Christian Science. There is a great deal of secret comings and goings, investigated by nosy Georgie, before it is revealed that she has discovered a Guru, a Brahmin from Benares, who communes with spirit guides and practices meditation, stands on one leg in her garden, adopts complicated poses and positions (which he calls Yoga), teaches calming breathing and so on.

Mrs Q’s fussy faddishness is funny in itself, what turns it into Mapp and Lucia gold is the way that Lucia sets about annexing this new addition to Riseholme’s rich cultural life, persuading the Guru to come and stay with her, holding a lavish party to introduce him to the rest of the village, and setting up daily Yoga sessions for those interested in improving their spirituality.

The complexities of the discovery of the Guru, and his annexation by Lucia, are accompanied by a thousand and one little micro-aggressions between Lucia and Mrs Quantock who is, understandably, furious that her pet star has been hijacked.

Which makes it all the funnier when Georgie’s tomboy sisters, Ursula and Hermione, on a visit to Riseholme, recognise the high-souled spiritual adviser as none other than one of the cooks from the Calcutta Restaurant in Bedford Street, London, where the sisters often have lunch. He recognised them in the same moment they recognised him, and bolted indoors. The next morning he has disappeared and so have choice belongings from the homes of Lucia and Mrs Q. But again, rather than admit they have been duped, both ladies prefer to draw a veil of silence over the episode, not report the thefts to the police, and give out that the Guru had been called away on his endless spiritual odyssey.

Olga Bracely

In the same way, Benson creates a great deal of mystery and obfuscation about the next incident, which is the arrival of the noted soprano opera singer Olga Bracely in the village. At first she comes for a brief stay, but then confesses to Georgie that she has been thinking of buying a little bolthole miles from the hectic capital, before, amid various secretive hustling and bustling, she buys a cottage on the green and throws herself into village life.

This has all kinds of comic consequences. For a start Olga is bracingly candid as befits a girl who was born and raised, so she tells us, in an orphanage in Brixton (a mile or so from where I’m writing these words). It is a typical Mapp and Lucia joke that Olga tells the local lady of the manor and competitive snob, Lady Ambermere, that she belongs to the Surrey Bracelys seeing as ‘Brixton is on the Surrey side’ i.e. the south or Surrey side of the River Thames (p.101).

Both Lucia and Mrs Quantock valiantly compete for Olga’s affections and but she is stronger than either of them. Her arrival is like an earthquake in the small self-satisfied community or, as Benson puts it with characteristic hyperbole:

In the old days this could never have happened for everything devolved round one central body. Now with the appearance of this other great star, all the known laws of gravity and attraction were upset. (p.171)

Olga manages to make a fool of Lucia in particular on several memorable occasions.

The string quartet

On one occasion Olga invites a string quartet to play, and invites the villagers to her house to hear them. Lucia mistakenly thinks Olga has hired the quartet from the nearby town of Brinton, of which she has a very poor opinion. Therefore, when the performance has finished, she very loudly praises it but laments that it is not up to the standard of her favourite group, the Spanish Quartet – to which Olga artlessly replies that they are the Spanish quartet! (p.193) Everybody in the village overhears Lucia’s mortifying humiliation and Mrs Quantock emits a squeal of mirth. In Benson’s hilariously hyperbolical diction, this subversion of Lucia amounts to an almost Bolshevik revolution:

In that fell moment the Bolshevists laid bony fingers on the sceptre of her musical autocracy! (p.194)

The comedy then derives from Lucia’s desperate attempts to roll back from this humiliation.

Signor Cortese

Signor Cortese is an eminent Italian composer who has just completed a new opera, ‘Lucretia’, and writes to Olga, the noted opera singer, asking if he can come and visit her, play it for her and interest her in taking the part.

In her innocence Olga wonders who to invite for dinner with him and settles on Lucia and Peppino, because they refer to each other by Italian pet names and are always dropping Italian phrases into their conversation. They are a little intimidated by the invitation but spend some time brushing up their Dante in preparation.

But the dinner ends up being a howling humiliation because, upon being introduced, the composer lets fly a volley of Italian at Licia and Peppino, neither of whom have a clue what he’s saying. Cortese instantly realises this and courteously switches to his poor English, but the damage is done and Lucia’s reputation for Italian is destroyed in front of all the other guests in the most high profile way imaginable.

She knew that, as an Italian conversationalist, neither she nor Peppino had a rag of reputation left them. (p.197)

And the whole village will be informed and ridicule her:

The story would be all over Riseholme next day, and she felt sure that Mrs Weston, that excellent observer and superb reporter, had not failed to take it all in, and would not fail to do justice to it. Blow after blow had been rained upon her palace door, it was little wonder that the whole building was a-quiver. (p.198)

Princess Popoffski

The last major episode is the arrival in the village of a medium and clairvoyant, ‘Princess Popoffski’. She is another discovery of Mrs Quantock’s, who met her in a vegetarian restaurant in London. But this doesn’t stop her moving in and becoming a Riseholme sensation.

Spiritualism, and all things pertaining to it, swept over Riseholme like the amazing growth of some tropical forest, germinating and shooting out its surprising vegetation, and rearing into huge fantastic shapes. In the centre of this wonderful jungle was a temple, so to speak, and that temple was the house of Mrs Quantock…

This represents a setback to Lucia’s rule. She has been a lifelong sceptic and sniffs at mediums, séances and so on, but is badly left behind as the Princess becomes all the rage. Everyone else (Georgie, Olga, Lady Amblemere) attends the séances and feels the table knocking and witnesses ghostly ectoplasm materialising into the form of a character from ancient Egypt or ‘Amadeo’, who claims to be a Florentine and know Dante quite well.

Lucia is subject to a score of snubs and petty humiliations and micro-aggressions before the inevitable happens, and the Princess is revealed as a fraud. But not to everyone. Only to the Quantocks. When the princess goes back to London for a break, Daisy discovers she’s left behind a trunk which contains some of her props. Quite separately, Robert Quantock discovers an item in the newspaper describing the arrest of the Princess for fraud – he promptly buys up every newspaper in the Riseholme newsagents, especially Todd’s News which had a big feature on it, and burns them all.

The guilty husband and wife decide to hush the whole thing up. The other lead characters, particularly Georgie, suspect something is afoot, but can’t figure out what. Towards the end of the novel, Daisy and Robert discuss the case and consider inviting the convicted fraud Princess Popoffski back to Riseholme, treat her with all sincerity taking her at face value, purely to pull a tremendous confidence trick on the rest of the village! Consider it but then, reluctantly, decide to be safe rather than sorry…

Cast

  • Mrs Emmeline Lucas aka Queen Lucia
  • Philip ‘Peppino’ Lucas – husband, retired barrister, author of prose poems
  • Georgie Pillson – Lucia’s best friend, ‘her gentleman-in-waiting when she was at home, and her watch-dog when she was not’ – plays with piano with Lucia and makes charming little water-colour sketches – ‘his mother had been a Bartlett and a second cousin of her deceased husband’:
    • Dicky – George’s handsome young chauffeur
    • Foljambe – his very pretty parlour-maid who valeted him
  • Georgie’s two plain strapping sisters, Hermione and Ursula aka Hermy and Ursy – ‘they liked pigs and dogs and otter-hunting and mutton-chops’:
    • Tipsipoozie, a lean Irish terrier
  • Mr Holroyd – the barber who manages Georgie’s wig
  • Mrs Daisy Quantock
  • Robert Quantock – her husband
  • Rush the grocer
  • the Guru
  • Lady Embermere – local gentry, widowed
  • Miss Lyall – her companion – ‘This miserable spinster, of age so obvious as to be called not the least uncertain, was Lady Ambermere’s companion, and shared with her the glories of The Hall.. her head was inclined with a backward slope on her neck, and her mouth was invariably a little open shewing long front teeth, so that she looked rather like a roast hare sent up to table with its head on’
  • Olga Bracely – the prima-donna
  • Mr Shuttleworth – Olga’s accompanist and husband
  • Colonel Jacob Boucher with his two snorting bull-dogs
    • Atkinson, his man
  • Mrs Jane Weston in her bath-chair
    • pushed by her gardener boy, Henry Luton
    • Elizabeth, her parlour maid
  • Mrs Antrobus – with her ham-like face and her ear-trumpet
  • the two Miss Antrobuses – Piggy and Goosie (p.113)
  • Mr Rumbold – the vicar

Comic phrasing

For such a comic writer, Benson rarely comes up with comic one-liners or zingers. The humour derives almost entirely from the ludicrous attitudes of all the characters, which are treated with such deadpan seriousness, and the basic worldview of the novel, which is intrinsically comic. But there are exceptions:

Mrs Lucas often spent some of her rare leisure moments in the smoking-parlour, playing on the virginal that stood in the window, or kippering herself in the fumes of the wood-fire.
(Chapter 1)

The doorbell:

By the side of this fortress-door hung a heavy iron bell-pull, ending in a mermaid. When first Mrs Lucas had that installed, it was a bell-pull in the sense that an extremely athletic man could, if he used both hands and planted his feet firmly, cause it to move, so that a huge bronze bell swung in the servants’ passage and eventually gave tongue (if the athlete continued pulling) with vibrations so sonorous that the white-wash from the ceiling fell down in flakes.
(Chapter 1)

‘Oh, I wonder if you can keep a secret?’
‘Yes,’ said Georgie. He probably had never kept one yet, but there was no reason why he shouldn’t begin now.
(Chapter 7)

Lucia’s garden-parties were scheduled from four to seven and half-an-hour before the earliest guest might be expected, she was casting an eagle eye over the preparations which today were on a very sumptuous scale. The bowls were laid out in the bowling alley, not because anybody in Hightums dresses was the least likely to risk the stooping down and the strong movements that the game entailed, but because bowls were Elizabethan.
(Chapter 7)

Chunky prose style

Over the past few weeks I’ve read a number of Agatha Christie novels and got used to her streamlined prose. Part of what makes Christie so readable was her development of a pared-back functional prose style.

Benson is the complete opposite. His prose is a hangover from the over-stuffed Victorian era, with long sentences packed with multiple clauses which create a very cluttered effect. At least one intention is that these elaborate periods to capture the complexity and subtlety of the rivalries and backstabbing which characterise the mental life of all Riseholme’s inhabitants.

There’s something comic about long sentences at the best of times, the piling up of details and clauses create a sense of cluttered absurdity.

Now the departing guests in their Hightums, lingering on the village green a little, and being rather sarcastic about the utter failure of Lucia’s party, could hardly help seeing Georgie and Olga emerge from his house and proceed swiftly in the direction of The Hurst, and Mrs Antrobus who retained marvellous eyesight as compensation for her defective hearing, saw them go in, and simultaneously thought that she had left her parasol at The Hurst.

A sentence like this also dramatises the way the whole of this little community focuses round the village green where everyone is spying on everyone else’s movements and continually deciphering and interpreting them, a hive of obsessive observation.

Stunt

The word ‘stunt’ crops up a lot in Christie (and F. Scott Fitzgerald) in the 1920s, to indicate a scam or schtick or technique or method. It was clearly a modish word and as such it crops up in Benson, too.

She had read the article in the encyclopaedia about Yoga right through again this morning, and had quite made up her mind, as indeed her proceedings had just shown, that Yoga was, to put it irreverently, to be her August stunt.
(Chapter 5)

Cat

I’ve got used, in the novels of Agatha Christie, to the use of the word ‘cat’ to denote a bitchy woman, and also the quality of bitchiness itself. Same here. Benson makes it the subject of a little joke passage. Lucia has made a comment to Olga about the forthcoming engagement of old Colonel Boucher and Mrs Weston, remembering how long ago she and Robert were engaged – which on the face of it sounds like sympathy but also subtly hints at how old the middle-aged couple are:

This might have been tact, or it might have been cat. That Peppino and she sympathised as they remembered their beautiful time was tact, that it was so long ago was cat. Altogether it might be described as a cat chewing tact. (p.196)

Summary

Very funny. Having skewered some of the popular fads of the day (Christian Science, Indian gurus, spiritualism) one wonders what was left for Benson to satirise in the sequels. Well, there’s only one way to find out…

Credit

‘Queen Lucia’ by E.F. Benson was published by Hutchinson in July 1920. Page references are to the 1984 Black Swan paperback edition.

Related links

Mapp and Lucia reviews

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by Simon on November 7, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on November 7, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/11/07/queen-lucia-e-f-benson/

Moses, Citizen and Me by Delia Jarrett-Macauley (2005)

439K
(The rebel army id number carved into the bare skin of 8-year-old boy soldier, Citizen’s, back, Moses, Citizen and Me, page 163)

Delia Jarrett-Macauley (Fellow of the Royal Society) is a London-based British writer, academic and broadcaster of Sierra Leonean heritage. Her first and, to date only, novel, Moses, Citizen & Me, won the 2006 Orwell Prize for political writing, the first novel to have been awarded the prize.

Stats

Moses, Citizen and Me is 226 pages long, with 3 pages of acknowledgements. It is divided into a 2-page prologue then 12 chapters of narrative.

It tells the story of a family coping with the aftermath of Sierra Leone’s civil war (1991 to 2002). The book’s protagonist, London-based academic Julia (Julia/Delia, kind of similar sounding names), receives a disturbing phone call from the neighbour of her Uncle Moses back in Sierra Leone. This neighbour, Anita, tells Julia that Moses’ wife, her Auntie Adele, is dead and begs her to return to her homeland.

When Julia arrives in the capital of Sierra Leone, Freetown, she discovers that during the civil war, her Aunt Adele was killed by a child soldier who is none other than Adele’s own grandson Citizen. Now the deeply damaged 8-year-old boy is back from the war living with Uncle Moses – the man whose wife he killed – and Julia finds herself joining this troubled household and trying to help all concerned deal with the terrible situation.

There’s no suspense about it: Julia is on the flight by page 5 and confronting Moses on page 7. The interest or motivation is not in finding out whodunnit but, I think, is meant to be in savouring Jarrett-Macauley’s sensitive emotions and the healing bonds of the women and girls (Julia, Anita and the latter’s two young daughters) who help Moses and Citizen.

Style and attitude

I didn’t like Jarrett-Macauley’s attitude or style. It came over, to me, as self important and entitled. Here are the opening sentences.

It was late November, crisp and chilly, but I was dressed lightly and wore no tights, to avoid discomfort on the flight. I had arrived at the airport in good time, no thanks to the minicab driver who sat in the traffic on Lavender Hill, stubbornly refusing to U-turn. (p.3)

1) ‘Crisp and chilly’ struck me as a cliché, the first of many throughout the book (‘Grandma Sara, a slender gracious woman with vivid eyes…’ p.13)

2) Why does she want to tell me that she was wearing no tights? It establishes that she’s the kind of narrator who thinks the reader needs to know absolutely everything about her, down to the state of her undergarments.

3) Why does she think I need to know about her argument with her taxi driver? She’s the kind of privileged, self-absorbed international traveller who finds drivers and hotel staff annoying. ‘Out of my way riff-raff, don’t you know who I am? I am a writer.’

All this clutter about taxis, planes and tights is hurriedly swept out of the way so that she can arrive in Freetown, take a cab to Uncle Moses’ house, and confront the boy monster.

His colouring was mine. But his spirit was so far removed from anything I had ever met that I nearly wept. Suddenly I felt panic, separate and afraid. (p.7)

I realised I was in for a long haul. The first few pages suggested the book is going to be mostly about its narrator’s rare and precious feelings, subtle perceptions, deep emotions, wonderful insights and so on, with very little factual background or useful analysis.

It is written, at least to begin with, in what I’ve previously called the Numb Style. This is very common in modern novels. It’s where the narrative so completely lacks all colour, warmth, subtlety or sophistication, all distance, detachment, analysis, irony or humour that it’s as if the narrator has had a lobotomy. Instead, like someone with severe brain damage, the text just registers one thing. Then another thing. Then another thing. Then another thing.

Small pink apples lay on the plate and I ate one. I asked Citizen whether he would like one too. He did not answer. I didn’t know if he had heard me. Then I realised I had been whispering. (p.8)

E.M. Foster at the start of Passage To India gives us paragraphs of description which vividly bring to life the Indian setting. Closer to the subject matter here, Graham Greene in Heart of the Matter vividly describes the sights and sounds and smells, the people and buildings and noises of Freetown. Those novels’ descriptions invoke a kind of man-of-the-world knowledgableness, the adult ability to sift and judge, to select certain details and descriptions and order them into well-organised paragraphs in order to build up sophisticated word pictures.

Jarrett-Macauley has none of this. What she describes is herself. In the Numb Style.

It is essential to take this slowly. I don’t know whether other people were standing or watching me. I remember only the squawk that came out of my mouth: animal anguish. (p.8)

As you can see, the all-too-frequent corollary of the Numb Style is the narrator’s claim that they have undergone An Enormous Trauma. The style is so brain dead, flat and affectless because it denotes Huge Pain. It shouts at the reader Look at me! See how much I suffer! The Numb Style generally accompanies a sustained outpouring of self-dramatising self-importance which I always find very tiresome.

My feet were cold, so cold they were dying, and speech had deserted me. (p.8)

The midday sun was grilling the earth but my heart was seized with a terrible coldness indistinguishable from doubt. (p.216)

I was bored by page 10, not by the subject matter so much as by narrator’s self importance, self centredness, the relentless emphasis on self self self, by the narrator’s relishing of her own precious feelings and responses, all told with the dead-eyed numbness of a car crash survivor.

He had looked at his watch. It had stopped. He had shaken it. (p.11)

When Jarrett-Macauley is not doing the Numb Style, she switches to bad poetry. Centuries ago critics talked about the poetaster, ‘a derogatory term applied to bad or inferior poets with implications of unwarranted pretensions to artistic value.’ Same here. When she’s not saying Look at me how I’ve suffered she’s saying Look in awe at my poetic perceptions.

Anita was coming towards me, gliding, her movements liquid. She poured herself into a shape of love and wrapped it around my tense body. (p.8)

There’s a lot of background about how young Julia lived in Brixton and how Uncle Moses came to stay, there were parties at their house on Sunday afternoons, how one day her mum brought Adele home. Moses was instantly attracted to her and everyone knew they’d get married. And then they did get married.

At that moment Adele did not know and Moses did not know but we all knew that Adele would love Moses and Moses would love Adele. (p.29)

Maybe this is intended to recreate the mental impressions of her 7-year-old self. But a lot of the rest of the text is like this and comes over as the thought processes of a simpleton.

Incidentally, I’ve lived in and around Brixton for 20 years and nothing in Jarrett-Macauley’s numerous descriptions of the narrator’s girlhood upbringing there in any way bring it to mind or capture its swarming, polluted, shambling, vibrant, smelly, noisy, threatening aspects (I’ve been mugged there, twice).

Anyway, Julia and Moses go to visit the camp for ex-child soldiers at Doria outside Freetown, where the main thing that happens is she has a bad attack of the Numb Style.

I looked about to see what was familiar. Nothing was. There were no trees and no flowers. I looked up and the sky was without clouds and the sun was hidden from view. I looked down and the ground was solid yellow dirt with no life. I looked ahead and saw no women. (p.31)

This isn’t a description of an actual place but of a state of mind, the brain-damaged mental state of the Numb Style. And then we have passages of the magical lyrical style, particularly associated with women communing, sharing deep feelings as only women can.

Sally and I sat opposite one another and said nothing but exchanged thoughts. (p.33)

But mostly it’s about Julia and her reactions to hearing the stories of the child soldiers.

Inside I felt a hazy dark cloud and guessed I was about to pass out. I made myself concentrate hard (p.37)

I moved closer to him; I moved closer to myself, into a narrow space where every emotion was restored to its full essence. (p.38)

For three hours I lay in my room, my body moist with the apple’s juices, and for three hours life wandered through my limbs slowly and steadily, like nothing I had felt before. (p.39)

There’s a lot of this self-centred, self-important, self-promoting sensitivity on every page. It’s like taking a wrong turning at the gym and finding yourself in a mindfulness class. Everyone is being very sensitive. Everyone is in touch with their inner self. Everyone is fondling their chakras.

Visions

At the narrative progresses Julia starts having visions which leads us into imaginative recreations of what Citizen the child soldiers must have gone through. She imagines a procession of child soldiers marching up her neck, she imagines her head is a map of Sierra Leone, she talks repeatedly about trying to come down to earth, trying to ‘control her mind’ (p.51), as these visions become more powerful and last longer.

She imagines herself joining the band of child soldiers, being with them when Citizen is abducted, seeing what he sees, watching the stolen children being whipped and crying, hallucinatorily entering ‘another world’ (p.54).

Suddenly the narrator is in the rebel camp, at their base, watching the child soldiers cry and fight and beat each other, being terrorised into undertaking another attack. Citizen is 8 years old. He is a member of the Number-One-Burn-House-Unit led by ‘Lieutenant’ Ibrahim. His friend is Abu, recently abducted from a village the unity burned down. Abu cries for his mummy. Ibrahim whips him with a 6-foot whip. When Abu’s brother gets up to go Ibrahim simply shoots him in the head.

Later she finds herself, in sleep, transplanted to Gola Forest where, apparently, the child soldiers had their bases. In her dream she encounters a mathematician, Bemba G, who entrances the boy killers with the delights of maths. She describes the entire visionary experience as a ‘multidimensional event’.

Among women

These kinds of intense visions alternate with passages from the ‘real world’, where Julia has got involved in helping old Uncle Moses with his collection of rare photographs by native Leonean photographers (because, we learn, Moses was himself at one stage a professional photographer), or spends a lot of time with Anita, a single mum her own age (late 30s) with two daughters, Elizabeth who is just discovering boys, and 9-year-old Sara (p.91).

These scenes are consciously very female, dwelling on the restful healing routines of female chores (cooking and washing and hanging out to dry) and female chat (about men and children and school and clothes). Julia sits on a stool in the yard and lets Anita redo her cornrows.

These quiet feminine times are very obviously designed to be at the opposite pole from the pure destruction of the child soldiers sent to burn down entire villages and murder everyone which Julia increasingly hallucinates.

Thus, in ‘homely world’, Julia cooks chicken groundnut for Moses and Citizen, and for Anita, Elizabeth and Sara. It is a recipe taught her by her mother who in turn had it from her mother, Sally. So it is not just a meal, it is an invocation of the matriarchy or, less grandly, female family traditions.

It is also, like all the dishes cooked in all of these books (by Chinua Achebe or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) delicious. None of these characters is capable of bad cooking. (Aunt Ida comes to visit and remembers how Auntie Adele’s baking was always ‘perfect’, p.141.; ‘We stopped for lunch. Everyone helped with the preparation, even the children.’ p.221) In much the same way that they are all wonderfully articulate, speak in perfectly rounded sentences, are full of inventive and creative thoughts, are always kind and considerate.

Also, none of them have jobs. Julia the narrator lazes round all day, reading, dozing, day-dreaming, or helping Uncle Moses in his photography studio or chatting to neighbour Anita or cooking up delicious meals.

We sat quietly for most of that afternoon – Moses, Anita, Elizabeth, Olu, Citizen, Sara, and me. Elizabeth began to sing. (p.222)

The book is marketed as a novel about atrocities, but it’s also a depiction of a pretty cushy lifestyle. Made me jealous.

In the perfection of their characters (and their cooking), and the way nobody seems to have a job, the characters are quite unlike most of the people I’ve ever met. There is a novel-ish perfection to every aspect of the book.

Love and peace. The love is in the taste of the food. The peace I took to bed. I undressed and laid my body on the white sheet. Here I am again, black on white, ready to dream tonight. (p.83)

One day Olu came early, before Elizabeth had laid plans for the day. He invited us out to Lumley Beach where we spent several pleasant hours. (p.222)

I appreciate the way Delia Jarrett-Macauley creates this feminist cocoon, this women’s swoon, a calm, undramatic oasis of homeliness, and I know lots of women who live this life and it’s lovely. But it’s not my life or my view of the world. My world is full of hard work and rare breaks and horrifying news. Unlike:

When we had enough prepared vegetables, we put on a pot of rice and retreated into the lounge with our drinks….I leaned my head back on then lounger, balancing my glass on my stomach, and closed my eyes, an interlude before dinner. (p.224)

Aaaah. Sunday supplement perfection. It’s no accident, or it’s entirely apposite, that the novel ends with the narrator imagining herself, Citizen, her friend Chloe and her young daughter going to a burger place in Lavender Hill (not, interestingly, to any of the ethnic restaurants and cafes overflowing Brixton Market) and, after a burger and fries, having rich apple pie, the image of apples one of innocence and wholeness and linking back to the pink Leonean apples she tried to share with the numbstruck boy Citizen right at the start of the story. It’s a happy ending. Citizen has been cured by the love of good women, family and cooking.

The child soldiers’ production of Julius Caesar

Slowly the dream visions take over the text. By three-quarters of the way through Julia is spending nearly all her time in the forest. On page 143 she appears to leave ‘reality’ altogether and magically transport into the bush. Here she rejoins Bemba G and the community of child soldiers at a place called Black Rock, a geographical which changes shape to create various settings (p.169).

Citizen and all the other child soldiers are there and new ones arrive every day. Bemba G organises a daily routine, organises periods for play and sessions of storytelling where they either recount stories of their true experiences or are encouraged to make up stories the others can relate to.

I think this is all in her head. I think these longer and longer ‘visionary’ passages are where the narrator has completely crossed over into an otherworld of fantasy and fulfilment. Here, in this imagined camp, she befriends child victims like Victor with letters carved into his skull or Miriam with her baby, with Hina, KT, Peter, 6-year-old Isata and many others, 35 in all (p.159).

Emerging to dominate this fantasy is Bemba G’s notion of having the children act William Shakespeare’s plan Julius Caesar – which, in some way, overlaps with contemporary African playwright Thomas Dekker’s reworking of it in Krio as Juliohs Siza.

Preparations to perform the play are described at length, as is the way the children feel themselves deep into the roles, practice the assassination and the fighting, meld themselves into this 400-year-old narrative. Whether or not it’s ‘real’ in the same way as Julia’s grumpy taxi driver, flight and hanging out with Moses and Anita are ‘real’ is beside the point. It’s very powerful and develops into the best thing in the book.

In between rehearsals, Julia plays a sometimes central role in organising the children’s playtime, in listening to their individual complaints and nightmares and stories. Her familiarity with the processes involved in addressing, listening to and gently coaching children made me wonder whether Julia/Delia was a social worker. Or a theatre director, maybe. The 60 odd pages from 143 to 200 have more focus and running energy than the previous chapters of the book, which felt more langorous and episodic.

This final third of the text builds up to an actual performance of Julius Caesar for an audience of about 200, including tourists and British peacekeepers. It seems to be staged both out in the depths of the forest beside the shape-shifting Black Rock and in a compound in the capital city, Freetown, at the same time. This doesn’t matter, in fact it’s a positive, lifting the final third of the book into a peculiar dream-fantasy-haze environment which I found more gripping than the first two-thirds.

Did Jarrett-Macauley help produce such a production, of Julius Caesar, in Freetown or here in Brixton? It really feels like it because the text is packed with detail about the Shakespeare play, about particular lines and scenes and moments, and a deep understanding of how the actors approach their parts and different scenes, having sudden insights, matching themselves to their roles, watching the whole thing suddenly crystallise into focus. Right down to the way that, at the end, appreciative journalists throng the ‘green room’ and ask for interviews and photos of the children. Despite being on one level a fantasy, it’s completely gripping.

Futility

When she’s in the ‘real’ world, Julia is helping Uncle Moses sort out his huge collection of photos, many by him, but also snaps by local Leonean photographers, so there are passages about some of these photographers and their work. She’s particularly drawn to (the real life figure of) Alphonso Lisk-Carew who travelled up-country in the 1910s to photograph tribal peoples (pages 105 to 107). At other moments, Moses goes off into long reminiscences about his wooing of wife Adele in the 1960s. In both eras (1910s, 1960s) Julia imagines scenes and conversations, notes records and writings, observes how the people of those times were artlessly optimistic about themselves and the future of their country. How, Julia repeatedly asks herself, did they screw it up so badly? How did they let the country fall into civil war and then collapse into out-and-out barbarism?

In among these reminiscent passages are scenes where, at parties, at dinner, at clubs, Moses and his wife and friends discuss politics and what the country needs. There are extended flashbacks to a period (in the 1960s?) when Moses did some photography work for a politician named Harris (for election brochures and such). At one point this guy tells Moses: ‘We need to make our country a success. You can help.’ (p.115)

Well, here we are in 2024 and Sierra Leone is still one of the poorest countries on earth, ranking 182nd out of 189 countries in the Human Development Index (Action Against Hunger). It is on most measures a basket case, the majority of its population living in abject poverty, still suffering the repercussions from its ruinous civil war, with tens of thousands condemned to live out their lives without hands, arms or legs, chopped off by the rebels.

Set beside such barely comprehensible savagery, the trite vapourings of characters from the 60s and 70s about ‘building a better country’ seem mad.

Summary

This book is useless for factual information or analysis. For Sierra Leone’s civil wars read Martin Meredith, for a deep dive into the reality of child soldiers read The Night Wanderers: Uganda’s Children and the Lord’s Resistance Army by Wojchiec Jagielski.

What this book is is an immersion in a particular kind of sensitive female consciousness, with lots of emphasis on the strength of women and the beauty of women, the quiet heroism of women doing the household chores and women cooking and women washing, women caring for their sons and daughters and their ageing parents, women healing the sick and rehabilitating the damaged.

I took her hand as a token of female affection: we are safe. (p.188)

A novel about a woman having dreams and visions which open up into an otherworld of alternative values and perceptions.

An invisible thread runs between the hungry empty ghosts and our earthly selves. As time passes, the veil between our worlds thins. I can feel these souls deeply. They are the same as us but without the blood. (p.185)

That’s what you’re getting into if you read it, and I know this kind of writing about strong sensitive woman and the depth of women’s community and the healing power of women is very popular and very successful. As I mentioned at the start, Moses, Citizen & Me won the 2006 Orwell Prize for political writing, the first novel to be awarded the prize. But, I’m afraid, although it gains a lot of power in the final quarter, the book was not, in the end, for me.

Recent news from Sierra Leone

Although the civil war ended in 2002 and the era of child soldiers is over, Sierra Leone continues to be one of so many African countries whose people struggle to rule themselves.

Uncle Moses peeked at me to check if I was ready. ‘This is what you people must do, do not be held back by as many rules as we were. Be free!’ I understood what he meant, yet what had we achieved with our freedom? War. (p.97)

Sierra Leone’s most recent (failed) coup took place on 26 November last year.

Child soldiers today

Guilty wish

You know that minicab driver the narrator was rude about in the very first paragraph of the book? I’d like to have heard his side of the story.

Credit

Moses, Citizen and Me by Delia Jarrett-Macauley was first published by Granta Books in 2005. References are to this Granta paperback edition.

Related links

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by Simon on February 2, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on February 2, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/02/02/moses-citizen-and-me-delia-jarrett-macauley/