Veronica's Reviews > After Julius

Warning, this review is a bit spoilerish. This is rather a disturbing read. If you've read Howard's autobiography, you'll recognise aspects of her first marriage to a naval captain, and Cressy's experience of an attractive woman lacking self-esteem and desperate to find love through a series of affairs with married men is pretty reminiscent of Howard's life too.

None of the characters come out of this particularly well; the only one I could really feel sympathy for was Esme, who has never come first with anyone, and at the end of the book is looking likely to have to endure the love of her life shacking up with her daughter, while she lives alone. The relationships between men and women are particularly chilling: it's fairly understandable that the 24-year-old Felix flees when it's clear that Esme is hoping for marriage. But Dan's Victorian attitudes to women reach a nadir when he basically rapes the naive, dim Emma -- who then decides she's in love must marry him. This is excruciating to read. Dan considers Emma his possession, and she is so grateful for his attention that she's blind to this. This relationship is not going to end well: once he's landed her with a couple of kids and burnt through her money, he'll be off. Yet even Cressy, who ought to know this, doesn't try to warn her off.

Even the relatively sensitive Felix is hardly a paragon of manners. He "seduces" Cressy by suggesting she comes to live with him so he can "get it out of his system" and continues: "All doctors are very keen on bodies, you know, and some doctors prefer women's bodies. I'm one of them. A woman's body seems to me a very good starting point indeed."

I noted wryly that Howard dedicated this novel to Kingsley Amis, the husband who did his best to gaslight her into thinking her writing was worthless. All the relationships here are transactional, based on lies and misunderstandings. There's also a parallel theme here of public morals versus private virtue (or not). Esme says of Julius: "He always -- or always tried -- to do things from larger principles, not out of what he felt about people, or any particular people, but what he thought people ought to feel about -- humanity. He wasn't really interested in people singly or personally." And Felix tries to serve a higher moral purpose by helping starving refugees in Africa, finding he can't love them enough to do it well. Cressy describes a relationship with a publicly noble and moral man who pressurises her to have an abortion and then abandons her. One of the soldiers rescued by Julius argues with him over the merits of "looking after number one" before trying to help others. This aspect of the story isn't really resolved, even if it's clear that Cressy's vague dreams of doing charity work won't come to anything because she's too self-absorbed.

Anyway, although depressing, the novel shows all of Howard's consummate skill in evoking emotions, places, and character. Yes, her novels are essentially about the same people in different guises, but they are always captivating.