A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor

Up at her window, Mrs. Bracey sat in judgment. Guilt she saw, treachery and deceit and self-indulgence. She did not see, as God might have expected to, their sensations of shame and horror, their compulsion towards one another, for which they dearly paid, nor in what danger they so helplessly stood, now, in middle-age, not in any safe harbour, but thrust out to sea with none of the brave equipment of youth to buoy them up, no romance, no delight.

Newby is one of those coastal resort towns that dies out in the winter. A "New Town" some distance inland boasts a more stable population, but down at the harbor only a few remain, locked in their unchanging lives: biding their time in the closed shops, the same old crew at the local pub. Lily Wilson lingers idly in the apartment above the Waxworks, wishing someone would come to whisk her off her feet. Beth Cazabon goes on writing her novels, oblivious to the troubles of her daughters, teenage Prudence and young Stevie. But some things do change: Beth's husband, the town doctor Robert, strikes up a tempestuous affair with their neighbor, and Beth's friend, the beautiful divorcee Tory Foyle. Until now, the two have detested each other, but strong passions transform into other strong passions. Mrs. Bracey, the elderly gossip, is dying, but she wants to be lifted to the upper room of her house by her twin daughters before she goes, to see better what's going on. And into this turmoil, which has the outward look of stasis, even paralysis, walks in Bertram Foyle, an elderly but charismatic man determined to capture the harbor in a painting.

The affair between Tory and Robert might be described as the novel's "A-story." The bitter, resentful Prudence picks up on it immediately, as does Mrs. Bracey in her tower, but Robert's wife Beth remains oblivious, perhaps because she lives too much in her books. It may be, too, that she is simply a kinder person than her cynical husband or her desperate friend, that she sees what she wants or needs to see and no more. A View of the Harbour is, at heart, about what is visible to whom, and why. Only Bertram seems to really see all the way through the people of Newby, perhaps with the clarity of a stranger. But he's strangely unable to put what he sees on the canvas: his paintings turn out muddy, unsatisfactory. On another level, A View of the Harbour is about the artist's relationship to the world around them. How perceptive do you need to be? Is art a kind of noticing--or is it more accurately, like Beth's novels, a way of ignoring the world?

The life of Newby, as described by Elizabeth Taylor--not that one--is rich, subtle and comic, with intense emotions that lie under the surface and are never really, as in a pulpier novel, let boil up and over. The expected showdown, for example, between Beth and Tory never comes. But the novel suffers, I think, in comparison to the other book of Taylor's I read, Angel. There's no one as supremely weird here as Angel, the vain but talentless writer. Instead, the human qualities are all doled out piece by piece, into several characters. As a result, A View of the Harbour seems more true to life, less grotesque, but also less interesting.