A Fugue in Time

Isn't it every reader's dream? You discover that your favourite author has written half a dozen books that you've never come across. You immediately order them, a mix of new and secondhand (despite your vow to buy no more books this year.) And now they're piled in a lovely heap, waiting to be read.

Reading Rumer Godden's autobiography, A House with Four Rooms, alerted me to the existence of these early novels, including 1945's A Fugue in Time (published in the US as Take Three Tenses). A Fugue in Time is in some ways an almost experimental novel, taking place in multiple timelines, often simultaneously. I was glad that Godden had shared the trick that makes it all work so smoothly -- paradoxically, she uses the present tense when describing events in the past, and the past tense when describing events in the present. It sounds so confusing but it works seamlessly on the page.

There are three principle timelines and they weave together, centred on the figure of Sir Roland Dane, who becomes Roly as a young boy, Rollo as a young man, and Rolls as an old man in the present. His glamorous, thwarted mother Griselda, jealous, tightly-wound sister Selina, adopted interloper Lark, and American ambulance driver and great-niece Grizel, dance around him in memories, echoes and ghostly conversations. It all sounds complicated and confusing, but Godden's writing, with its beautiful freshness and clarity, carries it off. 

Apparently China Court, written later, adopts a similar template, but this time with five generations instead of three. I can't wait to read it.