Notes on a Heatwave

A quite absorbing read by Aida Edemariam in last week’s Guardian Review led me to reflect on some of the books mentioned in the article, which are among my own favourites.

As Edemarium says “heat and long days do interesting things to time, giving the impression of going on for ever, however finite the season”. I can’t be the only person who remembers summers of their childhood seeming endless, and holidays that seemed to stretch delightfully ahead with the promise of freedom. The holidays weren’t endless but we did have more freedom and I spent many days escaping on my bike and finding some shady spot or quiet hill to read for hours. Strange to think those places are now all built over and have become London Boroughs. Then they were almost, but not quite countryside!

Our first book is The Go Between by L.P.Hartley which takes place during the

heatwave summer of 1900. In his 1963 introduction to the novel, Hartley says it was the memory of that summer that was the stimulus for the novel. Although he was only four and a half, the weather made a mark on his memory and from then on, for many years, “I always hoped that the long succession of hot days would be repeated”. He thought of it as a golden age and hoped in The Go-Between that he evoked the “feeling of that summer, the long stretch of fine weather, and also the confidence in life, the belief that all’s well with the world, which everyone enjoyed or seemed to enjoy before the First World War”. It is as good a book about Edwardian life and morals as any I have ever read and has that sense of timelessness Hartley so hoped to evoke.

From Leo in The Go Between to Leon, Briony’s brother in Atonement, who observes “I love England in a heatwave. It’s a different country. All the rules change”. As Edemariam notes this is a deliberate allusion to the opening line of The Go-Between, one of the best known of any English novel “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there”. Atonement by Ian McEwan begins in a country House one hot summer day in 1934. A misunderstanding by 13 year old Briony of an adult sexual encounter changes the course of many lives. This is one of Mc'Ewans best novels in my opinion and it’s huge sweep of narrative from the 1930s to the end of the 20th century keeps you gripped until the very end.

Unlike the first two, I remember well the heatwave of 1976. I was sweltering in an

office and going home to our new house with a small garden that had only been seeded that spring. It didn’t stand a chance and the bare,cracked earth offered no relief or pleasure. Maggie O’Farrell’s Instructions for a Heatwave is a brilliant domestic thriller which brings back that summer Robert Riordan, newly retired, goes out to buy a newspaper one hot summer morning and doesn’t come back. That same sense that things are different in the heat is powerfully drawn : “he surveys the damage wreaked by this never ending heatwave... he recalls the park as a space of differing shades of green... but now the grass is a scorched ochre, the bare earth showing through, and the trees offer up limp leaves to the unmoving air..”

Last of all and quite different is The Summer Book by Tove Jansson translated from Swedish. You might recognise the name as the author of The Moomin children’s books, but this literary gem is for adults and captures much of her own experience and spirit. An elderly artist and her six year old granddaughter while away a summer together on a tiny island in the gulf of Finland. This book is “eccentric, funny, full of joys and small adventures” (reviewed by Esther Freud) and is the perfect short holiday read for a long hot summer. I love it.

As I write this, I suspect this long hot summer is coming to an end. My summer house offers welcome shelter from the wind instead of being too hot to enter, the fields have been harvested and the apples are dropping, too small, from the tree. Time has stood still for a while.