Fireweed and Lapsing

 

Jill Paton Walsh is an author I discovered relatively recently, and I am still actively collecting her novels. Quite coincidentally, I found two of her books within a week or so of each other. I found Fireweed in a small op shop in Euroa, with a tiny collection of YA books for sale (I gasped audibly when I saw it on the shelf). Lapsing turned up, appropriately enough, at a church book sale in the city among many books about theology and missionary travels, and it only cost me a dollar.

I loved Paton Walsh's Wimsy sequels, and I also relished her Imogen Quy mysteries, but of her standalone novels, I definitely liked these two best (so far). Fireweed is very short (even by Paton Walsh's standards) but it tells a vivid and moving story, of two teenagers from very different backgrounds camping out alone in London in the middle of the Blitz. The Blitz setting is breathtaking in its brutal detail; Paton Walsh thanks 'everyone I know who was old enough to remember 1940,' and the novel very much has the flavour of lived memory.

The same is true of Lapsed, though this is a very different kind of novel; it feels autobiographical in parts. It centres on Tessa, an Oxford undergraduate in the 1950s (like Paton Walsh herself), a staunch Catholic who finds herself being courted by several young men and who makes a choice that is consistent with her beliefs, but which will probably baffle a modern reader. Shot through as usual with philosophical and moral struggles, Lapsed feels unusually heartfelt (unlike A School for Lovers, which was much lighter, almost farcical in tone). Like Tessa, Paton Walsh was also a Catholic. She formed an attachment to another man while already married; she did eventually marry the second man, but only after the death of her first husband, who was also a devoted Catholic; so we can only guess how much of her own experience was poured into Lapsed.