This week Karen from Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon from Stuck in a Book are hosting another of their club events, where we all read and write about books published in a chosen year. This time the year is 1956, which seems to have been a fantastic year for publishing! There were a lot of books that sounded very appealing to me, but there were only two already on my TBR and I decided on this one, Every Eye by Isobel English. This short novella, published by Persephone, has fewer than 150 pages (including the preface by Neville Braybrooke), so was perfect for me at the moment when I’m struggling to concentrate on longer books; my usual reading patterns seem to have been disrupted all year and I don’t know when they will get back to normal.

Anyway, Every Eye is narrated by Hatty, a woman in her thirties who is married to Stephen, a younger man. At the beginning of the book, she and Stephen are preparing to go on a belated honeymoon to Ibiza, when she receives the news that Cynthia has died. Who is Cynthia? Well, she’s the woman who married Hatty’s Uncle Otway many years earlier and who was to become one of the most influential figures in her young life. As Hatty and Stephen travel by train across France and Spain, the story moves back and forth between past and present as Hatty reflects on her childhood and her memories of Cynthia, Uncle Otway – and the older man, Jasper, with whom she had her first romantic relationship.

The book is structured in a way that I would often have found irritating; one continuous narrative with no chapter breaks and sudden jumps between past and present tense as Hatty alternates between telling the story of her trip to Ibiza and reminiscing about episodes from her past. Here, though, the structure works very well and, perhaps because the book is so short, it doesn’t have time to become annoying or confusing. And Isobel English writes beautifully! I am in the habit now of looking out for interesting, inspiring or thought-provoking passages to quote in my monthly Commonplace Book posts; with some books I struggle to find any, but with Every Eye there was a line or a paragraph worthy of being quoted on almost every page. There’s a lovely sense of place too; the descriptions of the scenery through which Hatty and Stephen pass on their journey across Europe are gorgeous and vivid:

Trailing banks of giant blue convolvulus, purple bougainvillea twisted into the formal intricacy of black wrought iron – all hang downward toward the sea. Lemons in the hotel garden, still green but ripening in patches, and below the shelving gardens, the wilder unfenced land parceled into small plots, sloping away to the sea’s edge: everywhere the stunted grey of the olive trees. With our small rationed vision we are like greedy children looking everywhere for more and more; we stare into the brilliance like seers, seeking an unsimple and deeper quality; when we do not find it, we call it surfeit.

The title of the book refers to Hatty’s ‘lazy eye’, which gives her the appearance of not looking straight ahead. She considers this to be a deformity – something that makes her unattractive and undesirable – and even after having an operation to correct it, it still has an impact on her self-confidence. Sight and vision are important themes in the novel, not just in the sense of Hatty having eye problems, but also in how we see other people and how they see us. For example:

After the first six months of our knowing each other, I found it impossible to carry within my mind a clear picture of myself in relation to Jasper. My vision was blurred, because I had outwardly accepted the state.

Or this:

I thought always before the operation on my eye that the source of discordancy between myself and other people lay in the distortion of my own vision; I did not know then as I do now that this outward sign was only the visible proof of inward impediment.

Despite her problems with vision, or maybe because of them, it seems that by the end of the story Hatty can see things more clearly than anyone else. I had heard that this book had one of those amazing last lines that make you catch your breath, so I was expecting something special – and yes, it was worth waiting for (but not quite as powerful as the last sentence of another Persephone, Little Boy Lost). This is a beautiful, atmospheric book and although it’s not one of my absolute favourite Persephones, it’s certainly one I’m glad I read and a great choice for 1956 Club!

Here are some other books from 1956, previously reviewed here on my blog:

Death in Cyprus by MM Kaye
Sprig Muslin by Georgette Heyer
Death on a Quiet Day by Michael Innes
Mary of Carisbrooke by Margaret Campbell Barnes