‘The World of Interiors’ might have been a better title for this novel. Its two chief protagonists, Catherine Gehrig and Henry Brandling, live a century and a half apart, but both are beset by circumstances that make them physically isolated and emotionally stunted. They rail in furious misery, and are sunk in interior communing.
Commodities matter to them: they are materialists gift-wrapped as aesthetes. Gehrig muses on ‘the huge peace of metal things’, appreciates Clarice Cliff tea-cups, arrays with austere elegance the tools of her work, ‘pliers, cutters, piercing saw, files, hammer, anti-magnetic tweezers, brass and steel wire, taps and dies, pin vice.’
Alone in his bedroom, Brandling is consoled by his neatly-sorted possessions: ‘My cuff-links, my compass, the enamelled miniature of my son, the pack of cards, my pens, sovereign case, and all the little accoutrements of life’. Theirs are the aesthetics of terminal frustration.
Gehrig is in her late forties and a horology conservator in a Knightsbridge museum when the married colleague who has been her secret lover for 13 years dies abruptly.
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