The fate of a beautiful woman
Kate Grimond
HIGH LATITUDES by James Buchan The Harvill Press, £14.99, pp. 192 Jane Haddon, otherwise know as Janet MacKay or the Countess of Bellarmine, is, at a youngish age, the managing director of a large conglomerate, Associated British Textiles. She is beautiful, clever with figures, wields considerable power and lives alone in an expensive flat around the corner from the Ritz in London. Her secretary is a resting actor who has HIV. We meet her in 1987 walking down Bond Street:
Put her there because the fate of a beautiful woman is still of greater interest to the read- ers of romances than the fate of squatting electrical retailers....
With the preposterousness of an 18th- century novel, the reader is led through her rise and fall, and, true to type, she creates havoc wherever she goes. Found as a neglected and abused child in a tenement in Glasgow, Janet MacKay is nurtured by an Austrian child psychotherapist who had studied under Freud (the success of her treatment was a matter of textbook celebrity). She is then fostered by a Mrs Haddon who works in a textile mill in Motherwell (later part of Jane's business empire), gains by virtue of her aptitude for maths a place at Oxford, and there meets, in a college garden, Johnny Bellarmine, a young blood of slightly flaky disposition.
Before long she is staying in his stately home, Wexley Park in Northumberland, and being taught French and book-keeping by his mother, Lady Bellarmine, in much the same way as milkmaid Meg, a pretty wench from the 18th century who married a Bellarmine ancestor, was taught reading and writing by her mother-in-law to be. Lady Bellarmine perishes under a cascade of books in the Wexley Park library and Jane(t) marries Johnny briefly, the third party in their marriage being heroin. She flees to New York, cleans up and begins to manifest her flair for commerce.
This is the leanest of the themes in this, James Buchan's fifth novel. Add to this curious narrative the complexities, pitfalls, obsessions and events of the past decade or two, from 'the tumult of the 1960s' onwards — Mrs Thatcher, the stockmarket crash, the hurricane of 1989, an oil spill, newly fashionable market forces and the de gringolade at Lloyds — as well as action which stretches from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego and beyond, and you get a sense of the richness of this topsy-turvy romance. There is little detail about sex, but a lot about money.
Among the various characters who play their part, one of the more striking is Roddie Turpe, the Members' Agent at Lloyds, a smooth operator who, by helping landowners make their capital work and thereby a fortune himself, aspires to join their ranks. 'A class in decline meets a class on the make; they combine and deto- nate.' There's also the lawyer (`behind a mind of sumptuous imbecility he had a mind both sharp and corrupt') — the age- ing general secretary of the Workers' Party, Sean McVie, the Tory politician of forthright language, and so on — not to speak of the, old friend from Oxford, Stephen Cohen, entangled with Johnny and Jane, and Johnny himself, the ex-hus- band, who consoles himself after Jane's departure with a Sloane — an eminently more suitable chatelaine for Wexley Park, it is agreed — but to no avail.
Back to the 18th century he goes, to the Antarctic, in the steps of an ancestor who was an adventurer in those parts. There, in the icy wastes, he nearly perishes; and although he returns to Wexley Park he leaves instructions that he wishes to be buried in Antarctica and at his last meeting with Jane urges her to learn to ski, in order, it turns out, for her to accompany his coffin. She carries out his instructions and buries him at those high latitudes.
This novel, as is to be expected from James Buchan, is extremely clever; and, though you may stumble over the more staccato writing and swim through the hal- lucinatory passages, it is beautifully written, but, like the high latitudes in which it oper- ates, it is cold at heart.
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