Saga of Tabitha Baskett

The latest in the recent flurry of American editions of Joyce Cary is "A Fearful Joy"--a whirlwind story and a humorous report on four generations of England.

It follows one woman, Tabitha Baskett, whose life and strange love weaves through the Victorian Era, the Kaiser War, the depression, and still another war. Her life is a story of changing manners and morals. It starts as a life of revolt, against the humid prudery of a rural town, against the respectability of Victorian London; it ends in resistance to the new fangled ideas of younger revolutionists.

Tabitha is raised the plain daughter of a plain doctor in a plain town. With an ingratiating knack for saying the right thing or nothing at all, she quickly rises to become the mistress of a wealthy Londoner, and the social chairwoman of a group of anti-Victorian artists. When her man dies, Tabitha gracefully marries an manufacturer, and finds herself running a near-Victorian household. From there she moves on to inn-keeping, and finally to dependence on her grandchildren.

But her love is a steady thread through this tapestry of change. It is for a confidence man, named Bonser, a loud and promiscuous swindler with a flair for spending money, a blackguard whose interest in Tabitha lies squarely in her pocketbook. He seduces Tabitha and fails to marry her, yet he appears again and again through her marriage and divorce to bounce her on his knee and ask for a pound or two. She gives him the money and more than that, for Bonser is Tabitha's personal revolt, and her only consistent pleasure, her joy.

Cary's style is easy and conversational. Except for the first seven pages, the story is written entirely in the present tense, which gives it the quality of a synopsis. That is precisely what it is: the synopsis of a whole block of English history, told through the life of one woman. "A Fearful Joy" avoids the monotony of a synopsis, however; Cary chooses his incidents well, and his story is well-paced.

He has a fine disregard for the conventional flow of time. He can dismiss a war or a death with a sentence or two yet spend pages on a picture of Tabitha disciplining her child. This makes for a breathless narrative, intentionally short on description and drama. But although "A Fearful Joy" rolls this narrative past its readers in a headlong rush, it stops frequently to breathe, to question, and to laugh.