Still Life by Sarah Winman is a sweet, beautifully written and life affirming story that I enjoyed in many ways. But I was desperate to finish it so I could move onto something less sugary. It’s a literary novel which makes many specific allusions to, and was inspired by EM Forster’s A Room with a View. The ubiquitous presence of a parrot that can quote Shakespeare adds elements of magical realism, there is an idiot savant with a Romantic imagination, and a flowery literary style that obviously appealed to readers of The Sunday Times, and to BBC2, who in 2021 nominated this as one of their reading list for Between the Covers, the talking heads programme introduced by Sarah Cox.
The novel opens somewhere near Florence during the allied advance up Italy in the second world war. Ulysses, an army driver born within the sound of Bow Bells, meets a cultured and aged spinster with artistic credentials. He introduces her to Captain Darnley, and they discover hidden works of art looted by the Germans. For Ulysses this is a different world, and a life changing experience. His magical time in Florence ends as he rescues a man about to commit suicide by jumping off a roof.
Florence is a romantic dream, and portrayed as such throughout the novel. But the London that Ulysses returns to at the end of the war is also represented as a dreamlike or mythic location. The local characters are cockney gangsters or warm hearted mothers and the setting is a British pub in the heart of the city and next to a canal. Dirty Old Town comes to mind in some of the scenes. The pub is a mother, nurturing its working class inhabitants by opening its doors to their sing songs and love affairs, providing a stage on which their infidelities and their passions are played out, and providing shelter for the odd and disabled.
On his return to London Ulysses discovers that Peggy, his missus, has fallen in love with a Yank – overpaid and over here – and given birth to that man’s child. The GI disappears, leaving the girl to grow up, but Peggy dreams of him returning. She and Ulysses manage a few brief physical encounters in the years that follow: he is compassionate, loving and gentle, giving her the space to grow. She marries again- badly. Years pass as Peg’s daughter grows up.
Cressy is a half wit and a bit of a seer. He wins a fortune betting on Fanny Blankers-Koen winning a gold medal in the 1948 Olympics. Meanwhile Ulysses inherits a house in Florence as a result of his heroic actions in saving a life. Later Cressy wins another fortune betting the house on Geoff Hurst scoring a hat trick in the 1966 World Cup Final. Cressy, Ulysses and Peggy’s daughter head to Florence to live in the property he has inherited and London bleeds into Florence, or the other way round. Children grow up and become lesbians. The aged spinster, also a lesbian, returns and the novel ends with a flashback to her encounter with EM Forster in a pension in Florence, where he gained inspiration for his novel, A Room with a View, and she gained an inspiration for life from her affair with a beautiful, female Italian servant.
I don’t want to tell you any more about the story. It is at the same time absolutely beautiful and completely annoying. Please read it to save me the bother of continuing this review.
Senior Reader 