Review: The Shadowy Third by Julia Parry
‘A fascinating and moving portrait of love, loyalty and infidelity.’ Sarah Waters
A sudden death in the family delivers Julia a box of love letters. Dusty with age, they reveal an illicit affair between the celebrated twentieth-century Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen and Humphry House – Julia’s grandfather.
So begins an intriguing quest to discover and understand this affair, one with profound repercussions for Julia’s family, not least for her grandmother, Madeline. This is a book about how stories are told in real life, in fiction and in families.
Inspired by Bowen’s own obsession with place and memory, Julia travels to all the locations in the letters – from Kolkata to Cambridge and from Ireland to Texas. The reader is taken from the rarefied air of Oxford in the 1930s, to the Anglo-Irish Big House, to the last days of Empire in India and on into the Second World War. The fascinating unpublished correspondence, a wealth of family photographs, and a celebrated supporting cast that includes Isaiah Berlin and Virginia Woolf add further richness to this unique work.
The Shadowy Third opens up a lost world, one with complex and often surprising attitudes to love and sex, work and home, duty and ambition, and to writing itself. Weaving present-day story telling with historical narrative, this is a beautifully written debut of literary and familial investigation from an original and captivating new voice.
My Review:
The chief pleasure of this book for me was the way in which the author weaves past and present together. Another (sort of) pleasure was the reading of a love-triangle which mirrored aspects of my own marriage. I certainly felt a bond with Madeline, the author's grandmother. One can only respect the way in which Madeline held home and hearth together in the face of her husband's affair with Elizabeth Bowen, a dynamic and successful writer, part of the Oxford elite..
In the research and writing of the book, the author Julia Parry feels herself bound to her grandparents by 'blood, ink, and ideas'. She physically follows her antecedents' paths and discovers that her grandfather Humphry's memory is still kept in far-flung corners of Britain's former empire (where Bowen's is not). Parry is particularly successful in inhabiting the feelings of the players in her story and contextualising them in the mores that governed moral behaviour in the upper middle-classes of the thirties. She links this with the uncanny (coincidences, feelings) that distinguished so much of Bowen's own writings - a body of work that Parry knows and teaches.
She is also very good of purveying the guilt attendant on such revelations. Bowen had several lovers but hitherto not much was known about Humphry House. It is plainly not always an easy task. There is always the sense that the writer wants to spare the relatives the potential distress of family secrets becoming public knowledge.
I loved the author's use of metaphor. She writes of a later meeting between Elizabeth and Humphry, 'wine in their glasses and water under the bridge'. This made the book poetic for me, as did the interweaving of the author's own journey with family anecdotes. The letters are fascinating. I wanted to cheer when Madeline takes the reins of her own life in hand and comes to feel more her clever husband's equal. As ever, there's no easy villain or hero/ine of this story but all three emerge as complex human beings, whose characteristics we can see in ourselves.+
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Julia Parry was brought up in West Africa and educated at St Andrews and Oxford. She teaches English literature and has worked as a writer and photographer for a variety of publications and charities. She lives in London and Madrid. This is her first book.
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