Life in the West

Introduction to the E-Reads Edition

The first volume of the Squire quartet, brisk and chatty. Published on 6^th March 1980—as a loving card from my wife reminds me, still tucked into her copy of the book.

We were living on a quiet North Oxford street and our younger children were seriously into education. We were always moving house, depending on our fortunes.

Meanwhile, Tom Squire is in Ermalpa in Sicily, for a conference on the popular arts, dubbed ‘the arts of no refinement’. He claims that the pop art of one generation becomes the classic of the next. “Homer was, in his day, the Bronze Age equivalent of the TV soap opera.” Squire is for the new, insisting we rise up to change.

Later, back at Pippet Hall, Squire is filming and being filmed. The traditional pretty girl in a swimsuit is with him. She remarks that “We are all symbols to each other as well as real people.”

This is the period of the Cold War. Much discussion takes place. Squire and his wife quarrel bitterly. Over Christmas, Squire’s mother, Patricia Squire, dies.

I had been attending a conference in Palermo, a conference with a strong Communist flavour, and not particularly enjoyable. It was over. I was standing on the dockside, looking north over the sea. This story began to build up in my mind, the conference, the players from various countries, where the economic blocs seemed irreconcilable. And meanwhile, Squire’s difficulties at home where he and his wife were indeed symbols to each other, as the girl in the swimsuit had said.

When I had returned home to that house in Charlbury Road, I launched into the novel. My mother died during that period; that melancholy event is recorded when Tom Squire’s mother dies, just before Christmas. You have to go on, whatever happens. Maybe the Army taught me that. Or maybe I had known it even as a small boy.

Anyhow, Squire has to press on. Trouble in Jugoslavia, where he is almost killed. separation from Teresa, his wife. More human experience, more meditation. More striving to penetrate the thickets.

He recalls a note given him in Ermalpa, in which Vasili Rugorsky, the friendly Russian, proposes they visit Nonreale cathedral and Squire pays the bus fare. “Our government keeps us poor as saints.”

They get to Nonreale and enter the cathedral. Rugorsky praises the elaborate artwork. Squire is unimpressed. “Without God, I can see no meaning in anything,” says Rugorsky. He asks, “Do you ever feel that you have come to the end of everything in your life?”

So the questioning goes on, the faltering marriage, the symbols, the seasons, life itself…