Stanley Middleton (1919–2009)

To review a Middleton novel once is relatively simple; after several, the difficulty arises from making comparisons with his recurring themes of advancing age, managing one's grown up children, and adapting to changes within what were once, the comforting and established patterns of upper middle-class lives.
Middleton always manages to capture these moods and themes well. They are so often framed in the retirement years of professional men and women. "Recovery" is an example of this. The title refers to a reawakening of Job Turner, a school principal, who has lost his wife suddenly two years previous.
His gradual approach to revitalisation is realised through music lessons he provides for a talented eighteen year old with future promise and his preferment as a new school principal for an institution that is declining.
So, once again, Middleton puts his assured hand to writing about the adaptations and subtle social attitudes helpful in making a recovery from loss.… (mehr)

'Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks.' William Shakespeare (Sonnet CXVI). So begins the novel with this quotation, but its aptness is lost on me.
Stuart and Francesca, a well-placed young couple with a young son are about to separate. The couple's parents have to face this crisis as best they can cope. The elder men are successful provincial professionals; both wives have provided unstinting support to them through their working lives. How this happens is the gist of this story.
The novel is stock-in-trade Middleton. The range of action is limited, but underlying all the conventional behaviour and common decency is an old uncertainty that Stuart's father, Frank has harboured about essentially what constitutes creation or even Creation.
Dear Stanley Middleton does have a gift for transfiguring middle class life out of supermarket trips, entertaining the grand children or fortnight holidays to the Continent into as real a vision as any piece of visual art.… (mehr)