The Picture Book [Paperback]

Jo baker's novel, The Picture Book, is a wonderful and touching tale of the Twentieth Century through four generations of one family. It is also a keen look at incremental advances in social position and mobility over the course of a hundred years.
That's what it's about - beautifully written; but also, it's an affectionate account of various characters from an author who looks closely at them and feels along with them. Some moving moments are presented with assured understatement. Amelia, who has previously made us bristle by her quiet anti-Semitic thoughts, is transformed into an object of utter sadness when she realises she is no longer the centre of her son's life. Later, her middle-aged crush on her boss is left dangling, and we're invited back through the series of events to realise that she was widowed young and has foregone love and physical affection, and will continue to do so. Moments like this have a touching poignance because they're set alongside the William-Billy-Will-Billie stories and we can see threads of emotion that might elsewhere, with another writer, be ignored.
Baker as narrator shows lovely bits of sympathy and understanding - particularly for small boys: young Billy's fear for his new toy car (of course he'd take it to school; and realise, then, that it might be taken off him; and why would he not have realised that? Because small boys don't think that far ahead); Will's protective affection for his little sister. The narrator changes voice ever so slightly along with changing protagonists, so that we know Baker is still narrating, but point of view is always with the character: `Oh Lord' is Amelia's appropriately quaint and sweetly expressed reaction to her waters breaking, and `Oh goodness' (Okay - Amelia seems to stand out for me).
Some other things: the style and descriptive ability evoke not just feeling but place and time with great precision. And there's humour and farce. I read the Observer review of the novel and it seemed to concentrate on what it termed the Boys Own aspects of the novel: Gallipoli, D-Day, the Oxford don... it seemed to miss the point. Anthony Powell wrote a wonderful panegyric to the minutiae of the Twentieth Century in his Dance to the Music of Time. At the risk of sounding opaque, what makes Baker's novel wonderful is that with characters like Cosimo, Amelia and Madeline she kind of steps between the beats.

What a book. Jo Baker's previous novel, "The Telling", is high in my all-time favourites, so I was eager to read this new one and I was not disappointed.

The epigraph quotation from Ecclesiastes: "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh. All the rivers run on to the sea, and yet the sea is not full" flows through this story of a father, his son, his grandson and his great-grand-daughter (William, Billy, Will and Billie respectively - don't panic, it's not as confusing as you'd expect!)

In an arc from 1914 to 2005 and beyond, the chronological order appears deceptively simple. But threads are subtly woven back, forth, and crosswise, and we frequently grasp the truth of people and events in an intriguingly non-linear way. The four main characters and those they live amongst (to call them lesser characters would be a misnomer as they too are drawn with deftness and compassion) are seen at depth, through their own inner thoughts, and through short scenes, often achingly beautifully observed, of their lives. Jo Baker's vision is unsentimental, affectionate and humane. There is no idealisation: we catch the darkness and light within each character. The sense of menace around one character, the aptly-named Sully, is all the more acute for being understated. Introducing three of the main protagonists from their childhoods, gives extra clout to our involvement with them - the author "does" children in a way which tugs at the gut without ever lapsing into over-kill. A particularly painful family pattern is played out one day when Billy (the married son) and his young family go on a sea-side trip - it had me wincing. The prose itself never falters, often soars, and is a source of delight - especially in an almost poetic ability to give a whole picture in one sentence: "little Billie Hastings, with her belly like a boiled egg and her narrow little shoulders".

We don't so much move through the twentieth century, more it moves through each of these people - both the wars and the peace. And it really does move. Quite how the author manages to so richly distil a character, a life, a world-changing event, without risk of floundering in a bog of unnecessary information, I'm not sure - but she does.

As we move through each generation, our vantage points shifts and we see characters we once inhabited, but now from the outside, and with the gift of hindsight - like pictures. This creates an almost cinematic feeling of both the space and the connectedness between human beings, and also of the unstoppable movement of time.

Throughout "The Picture Book" Jo Baker is the all-seeing narrator in the truest sense: she knows the whole story in the fibres of her being and gives us, elegantly and movingly, what we need to piece it together for ourselves. These characters and this story, for being so intensely personal, speak to us of our own family histories, and our place in the bigger picture.

And the final paragraph is one to die for.

I so enjoyed this novel. For one thing, I could relate closely to the Hastings family and the social progress throughout the twentieth century, even though the locations and family experienced were different in the detail. Both my grandfathers fought in World War One and my father saw action in the second. I was also the first in my family to go to university. Everything, the history, and daily life chimed in with mine. I understood the atmosphere in the second war of 'that this might all end in a moment' because of the stories my mum used to tell me; I experienced the snobbish gulf between jazz and pop in the early sixties and 'grew up' with the Beatles. I also experienced that inadequacy at university when I compared myself with my self-confident upper-class, privately educated fellow students.

But what I enjoyed the most about this novel were those subtle shifting connections between the generations, the development from something that was intensely of the moment to it becoming a piece of the past or something never spoken about. Each person knows something that no-one else ever knows.

Sully's character has been criticised by some reviewers here because he 'fizzles out.' But that's the point, surely? He begins as a threat that could wreck a marriage or even change the whole family dynamic had Amelia married him. But it is Billy who sees him for what he is and sees him off which is probably what sends an already sad individual off the rails. His mental state deteriorates; he becomes obsessed with the Hastings; he tries to attack Ruby but by the time he molests Will, he is pathetic old tramp. Will doesn't even notice his ears. In fact, the bitten ear lobe is a physical symbol of that shift of power, memory and meaning down the generations. By the time Billie finds it, it has lost its menace and is merely an object she finds fascinating. A historic artefact with an unknown story.

The changing dynamics of the succeeding generation of one family is beautifully done. Jo Baker's writing is exactly like the way Billie uses a pencil. In a few deft strokes, she can create a deeply satisfying picture. The love that binds the generations together is tangible but it is never sentimental.

This is one of those novels that gets under your skin and remains with you long after you've finished reading it. The only criticism I have is the cover quote. To say it's 'a life-changer' is so ridiculously hyperbolic, it had the opposite effect with me. I almost refused to open the book when I spotted that. It is indeed life-enhancing but life-changing? No. But recommended, none the less.