4 hours ago
4
Set in the early 1960s, The Daffodil Days tells the story of a couple who move from London to the countryside, have a second child and attempt to settle there, but then, their marriage in tatters, move away again. Instead of describing the couple directly we glimpse them through the eyes of the people around them, from the village doctor, their charlady and various neighbours, to friends, colleagues and visitors, offering the reader vignettes drawn from varying distances and perspectives. Although it is not mentioned in the book’s jacket copy, the couple in question are Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes; eight weeks after the period described in the novel, Plath, having returned to London, would take her own life.
During their time in Devon, from 1961–2, Plath completed The Bell Jar, gave birth to a son, Nicholas, at home, and wrote the poems that would be posthumously published as Ariel; Hughes began his affair with Assia Wevill, which Plath quickly discovered. Given that the couple’s lives provide the source material for an entire cottage industry, you would be forgiven for thinking that there was little left to say about their time in Devon that has not already been said; but by coming at its subject from the viewpoints of others, this virtuoso, deeply researched and utterly convincing debut achieves something quite extraordinary. At points, the experience of reading it feels very close to time travel: Yes, you think, as you watch Plath sitting with her daughter Frieda on her lap in the garden, or having her thumb stitched up by the local GP, or glimpse her getting up to write at 4am: that is just how it must have been.
The injured thumb, of course, inspired her poem Cut, and we see her testing out some of its images and metaphors on Dr Webb (“A flap like a hat, / Dead white. / Then that plush”). Here, too, is the camel-coloured suit she described in a letter to her mother, and which can be seen in photos of her taken in autumn 1962: having found nothing at the local ladies’ boutique, Bain has the shop assistant tell her to try Jaeger in Exeter. Here is the concrete floor that stubbornly wouldn’t dry, and the Bendix washing machine Plath was so pleased with; here is her trip to Broadcasting House to record her essay A Comparison for radio. We meet her friends Clarissa Roche, Al Alvarez, and Marvin and Kathy Kane, and glimpse Plath and Hughes’s famously difficult friendship with Dido and William Merwin – including a retelling of the infamous incident in which a pregnant Plath apparently polished off lunch for four people. In Bain’s hands it’s neither thoughtless, selfish nor “Pantagruelian” (Dido’s word), but a mischievous and deliberate act of revenge.
Structuring a novel so that its story is told through multiple narrators presents significant technical difficulties. Not only must each character have a different voice – something Bain largely achieves – but they must possess their own interiority, too, each drawn clearly enough for the reader to remember who they are when they re-encounter them in a subsequent chapter, and through other eyes. To control what each narrator reveals of the novel’s central thread requires the writer to steer a careful path: make the “plot” (Sylvia and Ted’s collapsing marriage) too important to all the characters and the result will feel stagey and overly managed, but make it too peripheral to their lives and all pace and tension are lost.
But on top of these challenges Bain adds another: she tells the story backwards, beginning in December 1962 with Plath and Hughes’s house, Court Green in North Tawton, being packed up after their separate departures, and ending with the two of them in France in July 1961, looking ahead to their move to Devon. Although the reason for this is perhaps understandable – to roll back the events that led so devastatingly to Plath’s death and see how and where the rot crept in; to close with the two of them happy and optimistic – it significantly impacts the pace of the novel, stripping it of forward propulsion, and layers on difficulties for readers already working hard to discern the shape of events through multiple viewpoints. The book might have proved a little more accessible – especially to readers unversed in Plath’s biography – either told forwards through multiple voices, or backwards via a single, omniscient point of view.
Despite this, The Daffodil Days is an astonishing achievement, its prose supple and intelligent and exact. Bain’s research has clearly been exhaustive – not just concerning Plath and Hughes’s lives but matters such as bellringing, surgery, shop work, the making of honey, sound recording for broadcast – yet her findings are given over to the service of her characters, making each of their worlds believable without the smell of the lamp. The pleasure this kind of writing produces is not quite enough to make the book work without some biographical knowledge of its two central characters, but for those readers unfamiliar with Plath’s last months a little online research is not a great deal to ask.
In a 1993 piece for the New Yorker, quoting the critic George Steiner, the great literary journalist Janet Malcolm wrote, “How the child, ‘plump and golden in America’, became the woman, thin and white in Europe, who wrote poems like Lady Lazarus and Daddy and Edge, remains an enigma of literary history.” This ambitious and insightful novel is a very convincing reply.
