An unsettling, serpentine narrative from the first paragraph:

My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them.

One minute their friendship is a stately minuet, the next a hellish prison. As a reader, you really don’t know where to perch yourself in this novel. It made me think of those paintings by James Ensor or Edvard Munch that see disturbing things behind conventional façades. (The cover of my book is a painting by August Macke.) Repression seeps everywhere. There are descriptions that made me think of Seurat (discrete experiences that don’t join up but form a whole) and Van Gogh (a hyper-real train journey on the day of Maisie Maidan’s death). The narrative is chopped up and re-arranged non-chronologically – a readable Dadaist text.

Which makes me wonder about the reader’s share in this novel. We are all such sophisticated readers nowadays! My notes in the first chapters are all about the questionability of what I am being told by the narrator. I do my faux-Freud and my post-Gide interpretations and wonder how contemporary readers read the novel. Perhaps the same as I; after all, modernism was fairly old hat by 1915, Jane Austen was pretty adept at shifting points of view and in Lucy Snowe Charlotte Brontë created a very buttoned-up narrator (narratrix?).

The first person narrator, Dowell – unreliable? naive? manipulative? – is the male half of a rich American couple in Europe. They meet an English couple – the Ashburnhams – at a German spa and form a close friendship over the course of their many annual visits there. The American wife and the English husband have “hearts” – seemingly defective organs that require constant attendance. Symbols and prolepsis abound. The account is written after the deaths of both and in such a way that the reader pieces together the past history partly in the same way as the narrator does. (Or so it seems.)

Names: Ashburnham. Very solid and British (“By oak and ash and thorn, good sirs . . .”) Dowell: a little piece of wood to pin things together.

So: Florence and Dowell have been married for 12 years; he believes she has a weak heart and must have no excitement (so no consummation of the marriage). Ashburnham and Leonora are the perfect couple: they are “just good people! How the devil – how the devil do they do it?” Of course, nothing is at it seems. I thought of Claudius discovering the truth about Messalina and Othello being duped by Iago.

So much of interest in this book. Dowell using his narrative as a kind of creative self-discovery/self-analysis; at one point he says “I had really forgotten about that exclamation of Florence’s until this moment”. But how aware is he? How transparent a narrator? How stupid a man? By the end I wondered if I should see him more as a blood-sucking parasite and thought of the final scenes of Saltburn – for the reality is that Dowell ends the novel living in Ashburnham’s old home, the carer of the young woman that Ashburnham loved, and he did nothing when he saw that Ashburnham was going to kill himself. (Perhaps he could even have saved Florence if he wished.) He insists throughout that he loved Ashburnham – an emotion that doesn’t change, even as he alters his views on the two wives. And yet . . . and yet . . . Dowell is aware of a changing, fragmenting self as he writes: alone of the quartet, he has to revise his understanding of the previous 12 years, acknowledge his ignorance and come to terms with the changed landscape of his former life. How is one to think of it?

If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn’t it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?

Leonora’s Roman Catholicism. Is it Dowell’s attitude alone that makes him so politely hostile to it or does it mirror the author’s? The tone recalled Lucy Snowe’s extreme sniffiness at the Villette Catholics, even though she loved one of them.