Looking back at the Lost Booker: Birds on the Trees by Nina Bawden

My first look at the contenders for the Lost Booker prize examines a classic 'Hampstead novel', Birds on the Trees

Sam Jordison

Friday 9 April 2010

Six books have now been selected for the public vote in the Lost Booker prize (a one-off award for books published in 1970 that didn't get a chance to win first time around thanks to a shift in date qualification criteria). Thanks to the interest shown here – and even though I'm bitterly disappointed that Bomber didn't make it through – I'm going to blog about each of the books over the next few weeks. I'll go though them in alphabetical order (according to the author's surname); since time is short, let's plunge right in with Nina Bawden's Birds on the Trees.

In an article about the selection of the shortlist, one of the judges, Rachel Cooke, described Bawden's book as "a story about a middle-class family in crisis, which is so good, and so true, it reminds one why the words 'Hampstead novel' used not to be a term of abuse."

Why "Hampstead novel" should be a term for abuse (if indeed it is), and why the British are so wary of writers who describe their own milieu, are questions for another blog. The significant thing about this book isn't that the protagonists are a family of comfortably-off intellectuals; it's the terrible pain they go through when their eldest son Toby succumbs to mental illness.

Wishful thinker? ... Nina Bawden in 2003. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

But I can't help wondering how this novel would be received if it had been written now, instead of in 1970. Would there be a negative reaction to its being so unashamedly middle class in setting and attitude? Would it be condemned as eventless, silver-spoon literature, as so many other Hampstead novels have been? Possibly. It's interesting to speculate, even if such speculation is necessarily idle.

I've also been curious to read contemporary reviews from critics not yet worn down by a decade of Iris Murdoch's flowery-talking friends and Margaret Drabble's domestic drama. None that I have come across even mention the setting – which is probably healthy. That's not to say, however, that the reviewers in 1970 were always kinder than today. Writing in the Observer, Claire Tomalin, for instance, praised "Miss Bawden" for displaying "her usual intelligence and originality in examining the changing and repeating patterns in family experience", but called The Birds on the Trees "very much a thesis novel", condemned the "appalling easy sentimentality" of the conclusion and complained that "novelists should guard against the practice of making the chief character in the book a novelist too."

It never struck me that this was "a thesis novel": it seemed too raw and emotional for that. But I have sympathy for Tomalin's other criticisms. The ending did seem overly optimistic in the face of what had gone before, and the fact that Toby's mother was a novelist also jarred. I'd add the criticism that it seems highly unlikely Toby's mental decline could be blamed on "drugs", and that once free from "drugs" he might make a recovery.

Hindsight, however, makes these things comprehensible – and adds considerable poignancy to the reading experience. Bawden's family found themselves in a very similar situation to the one in the novel (right down, it seems, to small details, such as one daughter thinking her brother had gone into hospital to have his appendix out when actually he was undergoing ECT). How could she avoid making one of her characters a novelist when so much of the story is about herself? Given the eventual tragedy that befell her son (who remained ill and finally killed himself), blaming it all on drugs and providing an optimistic ending begins to sound more like wishful thinking than a lack of realism.

Whether all that makes it a better novel is a moot point. I suppose it depends on how much you believe in the importance of the author and how much knowledge of their biography should affect a reading experience. My feeling is that although The Birds on the Trees is admirable, it probably shouldn't win a fiction prize. But I would also say that if you do read The Birds on the Trees, you won't regret doing so.

THE GUARDIAN