Skip to main content

Pippa Passes




This is a 'late' novel by Rumer Godden featuring, as so often, a young person's awakening to adulthood in this case a young ballerina on her first tour abroad, a tour that brings an upcoming ballet company from middle England to Venice.

Pippa is highly talented but only seventeen and in the corps de ballet when she arrives. When she leaves, she will have debuted as a principal and be on the verge of her first solo part (to be danced in Milan). She will have lost her virginity, discovered and rejected a parallel career as a singer, been awoken to the complexities of love, been befriended by an elderly aristocratic couple and fallen in love with an 'impossible' man in which the only future will be in the 'eternity' of memory and with the city (and, subtly, too with the Madonna).

All in a swift, light, beautifully observed and psychologically acute 171 pages...

This is not, by any mark, her best novel (for which it probably needs some sharper shadows and touches of darkness) but it continues to exemplify why I so admire her.

For the accuracy of her observations - how a single additional word, for example, reveals a whole new dimension in one person's seeing of another.  For the naturalism of her plotting - all of which unfold with a coherence that requires no improbability. For the glints of faith that are woven throughout and which rest wholly embedded in the foregoing naturalism - the Marchese takes Pippa to the first communion of one of her godchildren, something about the repeating presence of the Madonna, depicted differently but lovingly throughout the city, draws Pippa's attention and just that level of attention you would expect from a curious young woman, alive to making meaning from the complex changes unfolding within, and yet no more.

Nothing is forced, everything emergent from a gifted yet grounded imagination. In Godden, there is no experiment, nothing 'visionary', her's is the gift of craft, something continually accessible and exceptionally well made.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...
17 comments
Read more