Reservoir Noir and Long Hot Summers

 

Reservoir Noir and Long Hot Summers

 

[Suggested listening: The Boys of Summer by Don Henley]

 

Have you had it with the hot weather yet, UK readers? Having complained about the cold for the previous six months, are you now ready for the sun to ease off? If so, you are in good intellectual company - throughout literature, Brits recoil when the longed-for hot summer actually turns up, bringing only darkness and misery to fictional protagonists. The sun highlights the tense, the sullen and the sultry - in people, places and scenes. And then disaster. I have been contemplating suitable books – which, of course, I love.

I thought I could walk away from it and always have it, that summer at the manor, like a jewel in my pocket.

What a wonderful keynote sentence from the excellent, recently-featured, Before the Ruins by Victoria Gosling. I described it as ‘your long-hot-summer literary thriller’.

We’ll get to the big houses and manors shortly, but I feel I have identified another trope which I am calling Reservoir Noir.

The reservoir, a great British setting. French writers  have the beach at St Tropez, Americans have bathing holes in the woods and the California surf, but in the UK the watery centre of attention is an unattractive man-made lake.  

In Reginald Hill’s stunning On Beulah Heights – much more than a murder story – his series detectives Dalziel and Pascoe stare into a valley that was flooded 12 years ago, and think about the disappearances that happened then. Now there is drought, and the drowned village is going to reappear. Are there bodies down there? Peter Robinson’s In a Dry Season and J Wallis Martin’s A Likeness in Stone are crime novels with similar setups.

No-one is sunbathing or enjoying the good weather: they are watching the water levels sink and looking for evidence.

Sarah Perry’s After Me Comes the Flood is an experimental novel published in 2014, combining both tropes. It features a group of people living together in a house during a frighteningly hot summer. Perry makes the story compelling and fascinating, the book shimmers like the heat, and everyone worries about what might happen - where else? - over at the reservoir.

There must be more reservoir books: please add them in the comments. [I also keep remembering Lucia and Georgie calling out 'au reservoir' in EF Benson's books, but that is quite different]

LP Hartley’s sad summer is very specific – The Go-Between was published in 1953, and takes place over a number of days in July 1900. The young boy Leo makes a note of the temperature every day in his diary, and hopes that it will climb to 100 degrees Fahrenheit. But it doesn’t, a metaphor for the tragic end of the story of doomed love, class consciousness and the ruination of lives. One month of sun and the 20th century is over for Leo, as far as his emotions go.

JL Carr’s Month in The Country takes place in 1920, among lives blighted by the First Wold War.  An artist restoring a mural in a small country church camps out in the bell-tower for the summer. He glimpses a friend’s misery, while his own life is (in a Go-Between manner) dominated by his love for the Vicar’s wife, which is probably going nowhere. The Day of Judgement will be slowly uncovered in the church. Is the book about regret or redemption? You decide.

 

Muriel Spark’s Girls of Slender Means concerns the key weeks in 1945 between VE day in May and VJ day in August: the eponymous girls from the respectable May of Teck Hostel climb out through a window to sunbathe on the roof of the building, and the much-admired Nicholas ‘slept on the roof with Selina on the hot summer nights’.  The access to the roof is going to be of huge importance in deciding the fate of the girls when horror and tragedy hit the hostel.

The drought summer of 1976 is remembered by those who lived through it, and turns up in, for example William Boyd’s Restless and Maggie O’Farrell’s Instructions for a Heatwave.

The Boyd book contains this paragraph:

As I look back on the events of that interminable hot summer of 1976, that summer when England reeled, gasping for breath, pole-axed by the unending heat – now I know what my mother was talking about: I understand that bitter dark current of fear that flowed beneath the placid surface of her ordinary life

--so no great joy there. The O’ Farrell book is sweeter, but concerns a father who seems to have walked out on his family, and a lot of subsequent turmoil. It features quotations from the 1976 Drought Act as section headings, and has very convincing but merciless descriptions of how bad the population of the UK is at living through hot weather – there’s a fair amount of sweat.

Ruth Rendell, writing as her alter ego Barbara Vine, also looked to 1976 for her book A Fatal Inversion, one of her most highly-rated, and something of an ur-text in this genre. A group of young people, student age, spend the summer in a ramshackle house one of them has inherited. They call it Ecalpemos (‘someplace’ reversed) and tensions rise along with the temperature. Ten years later, bodies are found buried in the grounds. The young people left the house (well, the survivors did) just as the weather broke. And its beauty has gone:

The house that when he first saw it had seemed to float on a raft of golden mist, now lay in a wilderness amidst ragged grass and straggling bushes and trees dead from the heat.

More recently Erin Kelly’s The Poison Tree covered similar territory. It, too, has privileged young people sharing a house, and the summer weather, this time of 1997. Of course, there will be people dead by the end of the season. But even worse, everyone is unattractive:

I can feel the gummy heat of that summer now. I remember the prickle of my heat rash and the way the heat from my body made my cheap purple t-shirt bleed dye on my skin like an all-over bruise.

Mmmmmm.

There’s also Harriet Evans’ Wildflowers and Tana French’s The Wych Elm.

[And we all have to accept that at some point books that have a strand ‘set long ago in the past’ will actually have a date that you think of as being just a short time ago.]

For a final ray of sunshine: each of the Harry Potter books starts with a difficult hot summer where life is going disastrously wrong, and Harry and the other students have to head to the colder climate of Hogwarts before things can calm down. There, some bracing chill gets them over the hard times of the summer.  It was quite an achievement for JK Rowling to have a hero who, for six of the seven years of the books, can’t wait for the summer to be over so he can get back to his longed-for school – and an even greater one to inspire almost every child in the world to identify with him.

Of course other countries have their long hot summers to contend with – Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar has an amazing atmosphere of the heat of New York, and there are short sharp French books such as Francois Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse and Sebastian Japrisot’s L'Été meurtrier (One Deadly Summer). And there’s The Marshal and the Madwoman by Magdalen Nabb, set in volcanic heat in Florence.

But I’m sure we in the UK are more fascinated by the idea than people who live in genuinely hot places. Perhaps we want to believe that it’s not so wonderful: like reading about rich people’s terrible lives so we can think ‘just as well we don’t have that, much better to be poor and cold. It doesn’t make people happy.’

And I’m quite certain readers will have more titles and views to offer in the comments…