Catch [Paperback]

A bored housewife spends the day at home while her husband is away on business. In a series of mundane meetings with her friends and neighbours she considers her and her husband Tom's struggle to have a child.

Catherine, (`Catch') is competent pianist whose life is principally defined by her not being very `talented'. She and her husband, a successful human rights lawyer, have recently moved to a village in the home counties. Catherine has no job or career and passes her days in some idleness why she and her husband `try for a baby'.

Catch recalls her meeting on arrival in the village with the local vicar. She receives a call from a neighbour who she met through the vicar. The neighbour, Mrs Mountjoy, believes Catherine to be an artist and intellectual and asks her to speak to her daughter, Angelica, about her choices for University. During this conversation Angelica destroys her Art `A' level course work. On her way back home Catch encounters Graeme, a much older man, her neighbour, her only friend in the village, and a retired military man. He overtly flirts with her and makes her uncomfortable. On her return to her cottage, Mrs Mountjoy turns up and they have a conversation about the joys and horrors of motherhood which ends unpleasantly for both of them. When Mrs Mountjoy leaves, Graeme arrives, having injured himself whilst clipping his hedge. As she tends to his wound Graeme, who is slightly drunk, tries and fails to heighten the sexual tension between them...

Almost all of the `action' of CATCH takes place within Catherine's head. The narrative is a stream of her opinions and memories interspersed by a few conversations. It is a novel (if it really is a novel) which consists principally of theme and style, with little or no plot or action. It is highly reminiscent of Bellow's Seize the Day, but with much less marrow in the bone. It is also slightly reminiscent of the early work of A.S.Byatt: a book which is a little `afraid of itself'.

I have no idea whether I liked this work or not. There are some very strong aspects to it and some very weak ones too. Robson is a very skilled writer, but is perhaps a little too obsessed by his own writing talent rather than having a genuine interest in his characters or readers. Every page has some stand-out sentences which are a joy behold, but likewise every page has a few real clunkers, horribly over-stuffed with vocabulary and egoism. CATCH is a work of considerable authorial vanity.

Catherine is a reasonably intelligent and thoughtful person but she is not very interesting, nor exceptional nor stimulating. She does not have especially useful or insightful ideas. Her world is simply not interesting enough to engage me. I want to read an extraordinary novel about ordinariness, not an ordinary one. One has the feeling that Robson feels insecure that if he allows his material and characters to become gripping or fascinating then the reader may be distracted from the banquet of style and sentiment that he has laid before them. Egoism.

There are very few good novels in a female voice written by men. Notable failures in the field have come from William Boyd, Ian Banks and Ian McEwan. Robson does it very well: but again, that `trick' is not enough reason to read the book. He has the voice, no doubt about it, but does he anything to say?

I found most of the stuff going on inside Catherine's head unedifying. I skimmed quite large portions which consisted of nothing more than her internal musing. Never at any stage does Catherine produce a single thought which I consider `interesting'. I suppose Robson's point may well be that if all this mundane stuff is appropriately marshalled it will take on some kind of critical mass and become interesting. It honestly doesn't. The conversations with other characters are invariably more interesting than her internal monologue, but nonetheless there is not much going on in them. Slightly tense, slightly unusual, slightly interesting.

CATCH is a `Radio 4' novel, perhaps better suited to Play of the Week than to bookshop shelves. There is no doubt, however, that it is very well written, and that Robson is a very talented writer. I guess that most educated people would `enjoy' CATCH if they were to pick it up and read it, I just can't really work out why anyone would pick it up.

I have just spent a beautiful, snowy morning, curled up with several cups of tea (you have to read the book to understand that!) and this beautiful novel. If you want something with people rushing around, lots of action and an author who has film rights in mind before putting thoughts (if any) to paper, then ignore this book. If you want something deeper, quite profound, thought provoking and numbingly beautiful and gloriously written, then buy this. To the author, thank you for writing it. I will be buying copies for my friends.

I read Catch in two sittings, finding myself drawn into the story more intimately than I first suspected I would be. Having read and enjoyed Robson's last book, `The Separate Heart' I was correct in guessing that this too would be a well-crafted story. In the second half of the book, where a number of threads of the story start to come together, I found that my initial patience was amply rewarded.

Who, or what, is Catch? From the introspection of the cover picture to the novel's final fraught moments we are in pursuit of Catch, the pet name of Catharine, the main character. Does her cool and detached lawyer husband worship the ground she walks on because she is quite a catch, or did he rechristen her to denote ownership - her marital captivity? Her `liberated' (slutty) best friend hates the nickname and won't use it. We think we may have the measure of Catch during the novel's quiet opening sequence, as she dilly-dallies around her cottage in unhealthy self-absorption but as the story begins to unfold and gain momentum Catch's sporadically feisty determination to take the upper hand in events despite herself propels her into ever more dangerous territory. Prompted by the marketing blurb's reference to Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and knowing what fate befell Emma Bovary, our concern for Catch's wellbeing and sanity as she becomes ever more embroiled in these events grows stronger and stronger. Reading it is like listening to Bolero, where the audacity of the piece's almost imperceptible opening is followed by the ineluctable progression towards climax and collapse.

The story is beautifully composed and written but at times similes and comparisons intrude into the powerful narrative - like misplaced accessories on a tailored suit (couldn't resist that one, sorry). Some of the images are a little heavy - the brooding piano perhaps - where others are nice compositional touches that make the work sparkle - bleeding Catch collides with bleeding Graham, two wounded animals who slink off in the dark to lick their wounds. But what gives this book its thrust is the dialogue generated by Catch's encounters with other the other characters. Here we see the flip side to Catch's introspection, an individual whose eternal internal monologue is stunned into silence by the unexpected boldness of her own utterances. The dialogue is pacey and humorous - furious linguistic ping-pong matches of accusation and counter-accusation, playful volleys of flirtatious flattery and dodgy innuendo, knock-abouts of gratuities and banter.

Catch is a character caught in indecision. - a woman who is all potential. The novel explores a world of misconstrued motives, in which the main character unlike Emma Bovary is not bound by the requirements of a male-chauvinistic society and yet whose notion of self has allowed of no alternative. The flight from London and the solid respectability of marriage find her living a life she barely comprehends. Isolated and cut-off at the end of the country lane, her husband away, she has but herself yet she cannot make anything of that self as she waits in vain for a baby, for her piano-playing to improve, for her husband to return, for something to happen. Passive, indecisive and erratic, Catch is no feminist heroine, but this is not misogyny on the part of Robson, for she captures the very real middle class angst of a highly educated modern woman, who finds herself dependant, waiting, and adrift. A hair's breadth separates having everything and having nothing. With his earlier book `The Separate Heart' and now `Catch', Robson seems to be exploring the impossibility of knowing: the impossibility of knowing others as well as the impossibility of knowing the self.