Paradise Lodge is the sequel to Nina Stibbe's wonderful funny novel Man at the Helm but it can be read as a standalone novel too. So great news for fans of her first novel and even better for those who've only just discovered her original blend of compassion and dark comedy. Man at the Helm has been compared to I Capture the Castle and Cold Comfort Farm, and, in Paradise Lodge, Nina Stibbe acknowledges her debt to the gold seam of English comedy writing with an epigraph from PG Wodehouse.
When I first read Stibbe, it was Wodehouse's forerunner Saki that came to my mind. Especially the way her children and even the animals can see right through the hypocrisy of adults. I almost expected Maxwell, the "charismatic" Welsh mountain pony in Man at the Helm, to speak like Saki's Tobermory, and Little Jack's hilarious, albeit sad, struggles with his largely absent father reminded me of Nicholas, the disgraced boy from The Lumber Room.
In the first novel, it is Lizzie Vogel's mother, Adele, who needs to grow up and become independent, wean herself off the pills and booze to become the hard-working mother of Paradise Lodge. Now it's 15-year-old Lizzie who strikes out on her own to find out about life and its opposite – death.
She rebels at school, neglects her homework, even plays truant in order to keep her job as nurse’s aide at the old people’s home Paradise Lodge.
Ostensibly, Lizzie wants to be able to afford decent coffee and Linco Beer shampoo but what really drives her to enter this world and drink deep is her curiosity – she is fascinated by people.
In Paradise Lodge, the reader delightedly enters an even smaller world within the world of the village of the first novel. And this microcosm is packed tight with drama and the unforgettable detail that makes this world rock-solid from the opening, when we hear the unfastened buckles jangle on the Owner's sandals. He is "one of those posh folk who speak in slurred baby talk and pretend everything is jolly and walk around with ice cubes clanking around in a chunky tumbler".
Paradise Lodge and its inhabitants are reminiscent of JG Farrell's Troubles and Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont but there is nothing derivative about Stibbe's writing. She has her own voice – compassionate, wise and capable of taking on the darkest human conditions and behaviour without looking away.
From the beginning, when the observant Lizzie enters the deceased Mr Cresswell’s room, “the talcy outline of two enormous feet on the cork bathmat” issue their haunting signal that death will always be close at Paradise Lodge. The core of the story lies in how Lizzie comes to terms with that presence.
Paradise Lodge is an unforgettable place: touching, funny, grotesque and brimful of real and surprising characters. Indefatigable Sister Saleem arrives wearing an aquamarine, drip-dry trouser suit uniform and revives the lodge when it is bankrupted after the Owner’s wife leaves to set up a rival home. Lizzie’s wise friend Lady Briggs, believed to be a recluse, spends seven lonely years in her private room on the top floor when she really wants to join everyone else. “I have been waiting to move closer to everything,” she says not long before her death.
And Matron is a great comic character, easily as repulsive as Dickens's Mrs Gamp from Martin Chuzzlewit. In her constant search for a home of her own, she preys unsuccessfully on one elderly man after another. Yet, unlike Mrs Gamp and despite her awfulness, we like her because Lizzie likes her and Stibbe is a very forgiving writer.
Matron is a liar, but Lizzie Vogel doesn’t think lying is such a big deal: “to be honest people lied more then than they do today . . . it was before people really believed that honesty was a good thing in a relationship”.
Stibbe has been described as a writer of lists and her use of detail makes the narrative really shine. The novel is packed with a wealth of period detail, the sounds and the sights and the smells of the 1970s rise in a rich, intoxicating wave. Here, the day nurses are getting ready to go to the pub: “The Crazy Baby tongs was passed from one to the other and newly formed curls sprayed with Harmony hairspray. Tubes of mascara bobbed in a Pyrex jug of boiling water, cigarettes were lit from other cigarettes and the room filled with smoke, eau de cologne and the sound of chatter, laughter and scraping chairs.”
But the fine attention to detail is what makes her novels universal too. She builds her world in a particular time and place with a sure hand, but people are people whatever age they come from, and Stibbe knows people.
Martina Evans is a poet and novelist. Her The Windows of Graceland: New and Selected Poems has just been published by Carcanet
