“They got drunk and had sex, and behaved badly but laughed about it, badly like their parents before them. If they got fat, they cleansed, and if they were lonely or frightened or sad beyond repair, if the unhappiness in their gut and madness in their soul rose up like a chemical explosion that threatened to ruin everything, they did up the kitchen.”
Eleanor Anstruther’s keenly observed, quietly devastating satire In Judgement of Others is set in an insular, English middle-class community. There’s a brutal accuracy to Anstruther’s eye for the material details that make up her world: the coffee from Pret, the perfect Sunday roast, the dog walks, the Barbour jacket, the Subaru car, the Peaky Blinders box set, the panic that rises when the Pinot Grigio runs out.
Harold gives his kids new iPhones without consulting their mother, a deliberate incursion. Peter sleepwalks from Westminster to Cambridge to Goldman Sachs, and finds himself in late middle age without ever having made a decision in his life. Tessa tries to soothe her imminent mental breakdown by going shopping for beige stuff in Ted Baker and Oasis. Ros sublimates her ambition by having an affair. The tension mounts as the amateur dramatic society’s production of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit draws near. Repressed desires simmer and surface. Psychosis is unleashed.
“We gave it a shot,” says one at the end of a marriage that left both parties physically and emotionally damaged, and took decades out of their lives
Anstruther approaches her subject with the precision of an anthropologist, dissecting the community’s weird rituals and blind devotion to status symbols decipherable only within its tiny sphere. Like members of a pagan cult making sacrifices to appease capricious gods, the characters in this book are driven by a desperation to avoid emotions that they can dimly sense but never comprehend. Though they are rendered with some empathy, their ridiculousness is never in doubt.
The Grammar of Angels: Propulsive new account of Renaissance controversies about language, knowledge and the occult
In Judgement of Others by Eleanor Anstruther: An astonishingly chilly comedy of manners
Three Wild Dogs (and the Truth) by Markus Zusak: When the family pets are ‘complete b*stards’ but also ‘beautiful darlings’
Tenterhooks by Claire-Lise Kieffer: A strikingly original debut story collection
Anstruther’s unerring precision can sometimes feel a little schematic. Neat inversions abound. Characters’ lives are followed through swiftly to their logical conclusion. They speak in the clipped, heartless sentences of poshos in an Evelyn Waugh book. “We gave it a shot,” says one of them at the end of a marriage that left both parties physically and emotionally damaged, and took decades out of their lives. It’s a comedy of manners, but an astonishingly chilly one.
