PAPER HOUSES, MICHELE ROBERTS, VIRAGO

As in Doris Lessings’s two volumes, its enchantment works on many levels. Roberts, the author of fourteen novels, including Daughters of the House (short-listed for the Booker) carries the reader through what she rightly describes as “a fantastical city” in which a bewildering change of lovers, homes, communes, jobs and memories. Beguiling, enthusiastic, charming and vividly impressionistic, it is an autobiography to be savoured.

The child of an English working-class father and a French Catholic mother, she wanted adventures beyond those which an Oxford education might have prepared her for.  She begins with describing how the scholarly self which loved medieval literature was swept up in the revolutionary fervour of the late 1960s, encouraging her to succumb to free love (though for years she didn’t enjoy sex, and makes no bones about how coarse and importunate most of the men she encounters were), drugs, consciousness-raising and collectives. My generation of novelists, which largely rejected all this as both idiotic and suffused with a different kind of conformity, will read about her freedom with a mixture of amusement, irritation, admiration and, it must be said, envy. She and her friends were genuinely bohemian, living in poverty but boldly addressing injustices that now seem obvious. When, as Library Scholar at the British Museum, she finds Women catalogued between Lunatics and Gypsies, you begin to understand a little of what her generation were up against.

Having rejected Catholicism, she found like many a recusant, that she still had a “Mother Superior in my head”, with whom she battled, hurting her real mother very deeply. The promiscuity is as startling as the sexism; neither can have been helped by being what Stella Gibbons described in Cold Comfort Farm as “all arty-craft around the neck and ankles.” She writes with humour as well as passion, candidly admitting that a shrink to whom she poured out her streams of consciousness told her she was “boring rather than mad.” Sent to Bangkok as a librarian, she sternly reminded the King and Queen of Thailand that their library books were overdue before resigning. Back in London, she lived in a succession of communes and rooms in Holloway, Camberwell, Peckham Rye, Holland Park, Notting Hill Gate and Bayswater. An unhappy four-year marriage to William Binns, an art historian, transports her to golden Italy in the 1980s, and Harvard where she appals polite Americans by talking about nuns’ clitorises. She is funny, naïve and impulsive but also, underneath it miserable, self-critical, confused and honest. Both witness and actor in her life, she tries and mostly succeeds to neither bore nor hurt.

I doubt that there is a  novelist alive who will not recognise Roberts’s anguished accounts of the eternal struggle to find the time, money, independence and space in which to write, but its appeal for the reader probably rests in its description of an era, of a fiercely independent woman’s search for love, and above all, perhaps, as a description of the capital. If you can remember what parts of North and West London used to be like before twenty years ago then Roberts’s descriptions of buying food in Portobello Market or cycling through the City in the mystical “flow of alive delight” will bring tears of nostalgia to your eyes. Published by the Women’s Press, and briefly Poetry Editor of City Limits (the now-defunct rival to Time Out) her seriousness and her concern for structure are easy to overlook in the rush of sensuous, experimental energy. Alongside Toni Morrison, and the late Carol Shields, however, she invented (in Flesh and Blood) a form of narrative which can be read as two halves and zipped back together. Her wrestling with her Catholic consciousness, and the “magical and visionary” unconscious, has borne fascinating if not always satisfying fruit.

The metamorphoses Roberts herself went through as a feminist included the almost obligatory spell of being a lesbian, until – hilariously – returning home to find her partner Paula in bed with a bloke. Her numerous straight friendships and acquaintanceships include benignly gossippy mentions of Sarah Dunant, Duncan Campbell, Doris Lessing, Sarah leFanu and even the Telegraph’s own Cassandra Jardine.  The series of “paper houses” which she tried to construct through writing are mirrored by the real homes in which she lodges, always temporarily, and always trying to mend. When she meets and marries the painter Jim, clearly the great love of her life, you hope so much that it will last forever, like her joy in being able to buy a house of her own in France with money from the WH Smith Prize. It does not. She is reconciled with her long-suffering mother, and clearly loves Jim’s children, but after seventeen years, they part in “indescribable pain and sorrow”. Like Colette, whom she greatly resembles, she is the eternal female vagabond, somewhere between the gypsy and the lunatic, with the freedom, pain and visionary nature of both.

The Daily Telegraph, March 2007