A contemporary Jane Austen?:

'To thee belongs THE rural reign'

Helen Simonson is not one of the established greats. She is a middle-aged Anglo-American author, a Britisher settled in the USA, and 'Major Pettigrew's Last Stand' (2010) is her first novel. Not that a first novel cannot be great - consider 'Wuthering Heights', Emily Bronte's first and only novel,written at the age of thirty, one of the greatest novels ever written. My purpose in featuring 'Pettigrew' here, however, is to try to illustrate the assessment of a contemporary work of fiction from the perspective of the Imagination.

Simonson has an unaffectedly pleasant and comfortable style. It is a third person narrative, as in Jane Austen, written mainly from the viewpoint of the protagonist, Major Pettigrew, a widowed retired army major in his late sixties resident in a pretty little village in southern England. From the outset Simonson proves herself a master of context, one of the primary requirements of a good novel. She captures the atmosphere of modern English village life not only through her evocative descriptions of the landscape and the domestic and other locations of the action, but through dialogue that skilfully develops the social fabric. This contributes greatly to the readability of the book apart from the absorbing story, that other sine qua non of full-length fiction. Here is a synopsis:

Helen Simonson

Major Pettigrew is shocked by the news of his brother's death. His thoughts turn to the pair of ornamental guns gifted by a Maharajah to his father, who had been a Colonel in British India. One gun had been left to each of the brothers on the understanding that upon the death of the one the other would take over his gun so that the pair could be passed on down the generations. Pettigrew develops an interest in Mrs Ali, the widowed middle-aged Pakistani lady who runs the village grocery. They begin to meet to foster a shared interest in reading. This earns him the disapproval of the golf club fraternity as well as of his son, a London-based yuppy who is engaged to a brash young American woman. The major learns with dismay of his son's complicity with his brother's widow and daughter in a plan to sell off both the guns as they are worth a fortune.

Mrs Ali herself is at a crossroads. She is independent but, being childless, obliged by tradition to hand over the shop to her late husband's nephew and retire within the bosom of the latter's family who are also settled in England. She decides to comply on the condition that the nephew marries the Pakistani girl with whom he has had an illicit affair and fathered a son. The family had demanded that he renounce the girl and the child as the penalty for violating the moral code. He had yielded to the pressure although still in love with the girl. Meanwhile the major acquires temporary possession of his brother's gun in order to restore it, and determines to show the pair off at shooting parties organised by the lord of the local manor.

Things come to a head at the annual golf club dinner-dance. The lady members decide to feature an Indian theme with a re-enactment of Pettigrew's father receiving the brace of guns as a token of the Maharajah's gratitude for his having protected the Maharani when a trainload of passengers was massacred during Partition. The Major takes Mrs Ali along as his guest. Things turn ugly during the enactment when the aged father of the Pakistani caterer proclaims that his people have been insulted by the proceedings. In the ensuing uproar Mrs Ali leaves on her own while the Major stays on to participate in the resumed encomium for his father.

Pettigrew resigns himself to the loss of Mrs Ali. However, in the course of a journey to Scotland to join a shooting party, he detours on the impulse to look her up at her family home. He finds himself in the midst of a family dispute over Mrs Ali's insistence that the nephew marry the girl he had been forced to renounce and accept his son. On realising that Mrs Ali still loves him he persuades her to leave with him and they spend an idyllic weekend in Wales, the shooting party forgotten. When they return to the village on the eve of the nephew's wedding, the latter's grandmother attacks and seriously injures the bride. The nephew runs away to commit suicide by flinging himself off a precipice into the sea. The Major intervenes, saves the nephew but falls halfway down the cliff himself and has to be rescued. The grandmother is arrested for deportation, the major recovers in hospital having earned the admiration of all concerned, including his son who breaks the news that the one gun used by the major in the scuffle had fallen down the cliff and been destroyed. The nephew is reconciled with his family although the girl decides against marrying him, valuing her independence too much. Finally Pettigrew and Mrs Ali are married in the presence of friends and well-wishers along with some ill-wishers among the ladies.

Simonson adroitly captures the realities of modern English village life, with the complicating Asian immigrant presence, the natural beauty of the countryside threatened by a massive housing project as well as the destruction of wildlife by shooting parties, the solidarity among the local gentry as centred on the golf club and the pernicious commercial influence of London and the USA.

It is good social satire facilitated by a love story that involves a seemingly unmatched couple and provokes the exposure of racialism, materialism and extremism. As a convincing slice of life presented with humor and understanding and a story illustrating the triumph of love over prejudice, the novel is surely good value for money - USD 25.00 to be precise.

It has been suggested that Simonson is a modern-day Jane Austen, working within the small compass of contemporary English rural society. On the face of it this seems a fair comparison. But Austen's achievement has to do with the revelation and adjustment of character through developing personal relationships.

In the process our own understanding of human nature, our own and other people's, is adjusted and deepened. Thus genuine value is created for us as Austen, even within that small compass, puts her heart into making sense of the full extent of her experience of life. In 'Pettigrew' we have the major convincingly drawn by the author. He is a loyal subject of the crown, the ideal English gentleman and sportsman, having his foibles and prejudices but ultimately humane, liberal and enlightened. He is challenged by the social realities of modern life but is able, through his eminently civilized response, to come to terms with them. But he is the only three dimensional character in the novel. The others are two dimensional or less, even Mrs Ali however sympathetically she is drawn. They are simply foils to the major, eventually won over by his gallantry, decency and magnanimity.

What we realise from this one-sided character focus is that 'Major Pettigrew actually makes his last stand' as the latter-day representative of the British Raj. He is valiantly discharging the 'white man's (residual) burden' of civilizing the benighted of the third world and chastening his prejudice-ridden countrymen including his son.

Of course there has to be a grand gesture, so he romances the least objectionable or most British-like of the immigrants, the eminently presentable Mrs Ali. She speaks as good English as the major and, significantly, shares his love of Kipling, the writer who unreservedly romanticised British imperialism. (Jane Austen's heroines, on the other hand, were partial to Scott, the romantic, and Byron, the rebel - no upholders of the status quo.)

And it is ultimately the status quo that this novel celebrates. Which is why there is no genuine creation of value as we would expect of a work of the imagination.

The author has set herself to paint a portrait of the modern English village and developed an ingenious tale to frame it. But she does not appear to have responded fully to the potential of the experience she records. That is why the other characters are thinly realised and the events are somewhat sensationalised, viz. a dinner-dance fracas, attempted murder and suicide and a heroic rescue.

Thus, in spite of the effort to portray the major as a conquering hero, romantically and otherwise, we see him for what he actually is, what Lawrence would call a social being, a somewhat superior representative of his social class and little more.

And, as in 'Downton Abbey', it is under the benevolent umbrella of such a favoured class that the lower orders of rural society must necessarily, it seems, find shelter. Britannia may no longer rule the waves, but the evidence of this novel is, in the words of Thomson's poem, that still "to thee belongs the rural reign."