The Rain Before it Falls, by Jonathan Coe
I’d been looking forward to reading this novel for ages. I’m a confirmed fan of Jonathan Coe, and have read all his novels, though I have to admit not to having read his biography of the avant garde novelist B. S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant. Not having read any of Johnson’s own work, I didn’t see much point. Coe, though, has established himself as one of Britain’s leading novelists, able to write thoughtfully and gently about people and relationships in The Accidental Woman and A Touch of Love, savagely in the epic satire What a Carve Up! (published in the States as The Winshaw Legacy) and in a darkly comic, disturbing mode in The House of Sleep, a strange and affecting love story that I think is his best work so far. Most recently he reached a wide audience with his comedies of society, history and youth in Birmingham, The Rotters’ Club and The Closed Circle. Few British novelists have such an impressive and enjoyable backlist; and only giving up the day job for a mad impoverished writing vocation delayed my reading The Rain Before it Falls till it came out in paperback. I wasn’t disappointed.
A number of reviewers have remarked that this novel is a departure for Coe: it’s an unremittingly serious novel. True, it is his least comic work so far, although I do sense an underlying unity of tone or at least a commonality with the voice of his earlier books. Coe has a sense I think of life as absurd and moving at the same time, of a world where the most ridiculous event can be the most moving, so that his comedy has always been bound up with thoughts of the sadness and tragedy of life. In The Rain Before it Falls we look through the telescope from the other end, the ludicrousness of people’s behaviour, the unbiddable randomness of events and the surprise of coincidence all detectable somewhere in the background, while Coe’s focus is serious – tragic, even. This is a very successful novel telling a story that is both pathetic and sad in the strongest senses of both words.
The narrative is framed in a satisfyingly old-fashioned way. Gill and her daughters listen to tapes recorded by Gill’s aunt Rosamond before she took her own life; Rosamond leaves instructions to deliver the tapes to her young, blind cousin Imogen but Imogen can’t be found. So Gill and her daughters are the first to hear the story of who Imogen is and how she came into the world, a tale Rosamond tells by describing a series of family photographs, the first taken just before the war, the last from 1983, each of which represents a key event in the history of the family: Rosamond’s evacuation to Shropshire during the war and her relationships with her cousin Beatrix; Rosamond’s life in London with her lover Rebecca and little Thea; and the strange relationships between Beatrix, her daughter Thea and Theas’s own daughter – Imogen. I found each episode absorbing and the whole, building story completely compelling as we see pain and damage echoing through the generations. This novel is a fast read, as well as a serious one, and you’ll have as much difficulty putting it down as Gill and her daughters have in resisting the hiss of Rosamond’s cassettes.
Catharine picked up the remote control, turned the volume up loud, and the first thing that they heard, after a few seconds, was a surge of hiss, followed by the boom and crackle of a microphone being turned on and then adjusted, scraped along a hard surface upon its plastic stand. Then there was a cough, and the clearing of a throat; and then a voice, the voice they had all been expecting to hear, although that did not make it any the less ghostly. It was he voice of Rosamond, alone in the sitting room of her bungalow in Shropshire, speaking into the microphone just a few days before she died.
It’s not a book of huge size and sweep, you might argue, even though temporally it covers decades. The focus on a few relationships and the device of the photographs I think gives the book an impression of slightness that’s a bit unfair to it, and impression that’s strangely intensified by its inchoate suggestion of something supernatural at work. Not is it a novel you’d read for its poetic or luminous style. Coe’s style here is straightforward pane-of-glass prose, something I thoroughly approve of, so that the writing is imperceptibly strong rather than in any way showy. Once, I admit, I did feel there was slight stylistic strain, in a piece of dialogue – very rare for Jonathan Coe, this, but I think he must have been tempted into it by the beauty of his title. The historical, emotional and psychological imagination here are outstanding though, and all the more so because Coe is daring enough to write a novel all of whose ensemble of principal characters are women, in which the only close sexual relationships are between women – Coe offers us an interestingly distanced yet sympathetic view of a partly fulfilled twentieth-century lesbian life. Only once did I feel one of the female characters behaved suspiciously like a man, and even then, I didn’t feel it strongly. Until now he’s been, in the main, a markedly masculine writer I think, so I wonder what women readers will think about this book. Unsurprisingly cinema features in one of the episodes – film is a recurring interest of Coe’s – but the real thematic interest of the novel is I think in how stories can be told through the one-dimensional media of sound and pictures. Read one way, it’s an exploration of truth and recollection and to what extent memory and the camera lie.
I am tempted, now, to crumple this photograph up and throw it away. The smiles on our faces nauseate me. Well, the smile on my face anyway; and hers. None of the children are smiling, in point of fact – Thea with better reason than most. What a deceitful thing a photograph is. They say that memory plays tricks on one. Not nearly as much as a photograph does, in my view. Let me put this lying image to one side, close my eyes, and think back to that day.
Motherhood is the other key subject of the novel: what it is and what it means, how its responsibilities can be put down and forgotten by those who attain it, and how those who need those bonds can be shut out. As I expected, The Rain Before it Falls is an outstanding read, and definitely a novel to read in 2008 if you can. The mystery is why Jonathan Coe doesn’t have a higher profile, as one of our best novelists with a substantial body of work behind him already and the promise of more good work ahead. Perhaps it’s because he has written funnily, something which by some strange perversion of literary life can blind people to a writer’s quality. He deserves to be much better known that he is; but for the meantime, I’ll content myself with advising anyone who doesn’t know him to pick up his books. If your normal preference is for serious, emotional rather than comic social fiction, The Rain Before it Falls is a good place to start.
Gill hung up and stood in the centre of the kitchen, giddy, her thoughts still spiralling. A patchwork, made up of … coincidences? Was that what they were? If only she could stand back, see the design more clearly. But if anything it was getting fainter, already. From far away, far off in London, Catharine’s sense of loss and abandonment was transmitting itself, stealing into her mother’s heart, freighted with anger as well as pain.
I disagree with Sophie Harrison about Rosamond’s tonal variability – I didn’t notice that at all, and found her voice recognisable and convincing. I disagree, too, with Adam Mars-Jones, who thought the pace was slowed by the device of the photographs. How could he think this? I think he mustn’t have felt the suspense that drives you forward from one episode to the next. Patrick Ness was much more on the money and perhaps has the explanation for that slightness I felt, though how he can bring in the Smiths, I don’t know. Erica Wagner was far too negative and I'm astonished she thinks she needed an explanation of why Beatrix became "Annie". She seems to me to have misread this novel completely and to have missed the power of its emotional understatement. I think the quibbles in this Spectator review are a bit niggling, and that Carol Birch expected too much if she wanted first-person narration to consist of naturalistic speech, but Ian Sansom and Ed Wood only praised the novel, and were right to do so. Laura Miller was also very positive, in particular about Coe’s portrayal of the relationships between women. The dovegreyreader loved it. Ella Taylor was less sure.
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