Holiday
Stanley Middleton, 1974
This accomplished novel, winner of the 1974 Booker prize, is set in an invented resort, Bealthorpe, on the east coast of England: a world of landladies, beach towels and half-hearted dalliance. It is fiction’s equivalent to a sepia postcard, bringing out not what Philip Larkin dubbed as the “miniature gaiety” of the seaside but its dependable melancholy. Edwin Fisher returns to the scene of his childhood holidays for a week’s reflection on the end of his marriage, before running unexpectedly into his father-in-law, one of life’s jovial fixers, determined to put his daughter’s marriage back on track.
The Holiday
Stevie Smith, 1949
The poet Stevie Smith, who lived with her aunt in Palmers Green, north London, memorably declared: “Travel narrows the mind.” Yet in this delightful novel (her favourite), she packs Celia’s bags for Lincolnshire where she visits her Uncle Heber, a vicar. She also gives Celia an Indian background and Lincolnshire is fancifully reconsidered: “I have the feeling it is India before me and not England; it is warmer, it grows warm and close, the night has a wild smell, a smell of dung, of sour smoke, of a magnolia, of a heavy scent…”
Light Years
James Salter, 1975
This sensual, desolate masterpiece includes an unsatisfactory holiday taken by the middle-aged narrator, estranged from his wife, with a recently acquired Italian lover, Lia, on the Tuscan coast in April. “The country they were passing through was not what he had expected; it was bare, industrial seacoast.” Low-season holidays often suit fiction best because off-peak equals unpredictable. This is a barren non-honeymoon; the hotel is “isolated and expensive” and in a chilly, dark, mosquito-ridden room, two single beds are pushed together to form a double – a good symbol for two people not converging as they should.
A Room With a View
EM Forster, 1908
Lucy Honeychurch, an upper-middle-class English woman, and her chaperone complain on arrival at Pension Bertolini in Florence (their room faces north, the meat served is second rate) but it is upon them that Forster turns his amusing and critical eye. The 1908 classic now reads as at once dated and fresh: “People told them what to see, when to see it, how to stop the electric trams, how to get rid of the beggars, how much to give for a vellum blotter…” Lucy surrenders to “the pernicious charm of Italy” and begins to be happy.
The Comfort of Strangers
Ian McEwan, 1981
The word “comfort” could not be more ironic. This is a nightmarish novel about Mary and Colin, who have been lovers for years and are on holiday in a city without a name – resembling Venice. It is fitting the city should be unnamed for this is about losing yourself in the worst and most complete way. The couple become involved with suavely hospitable Robert and Caroline whose taste for sado-masochism does not at first show itself. A masterly account of a holiday from which there can be no return.
The Beach
Alex Garland, 1996
The atmosphere of this unforgettably unsettling, bestselling novel is also what happens when people live on holiday and off-limits – beyond themselves. It is an idyll turned inside out. When Richard, a British backpacker, is given a map by a mysterious Scotsman about a hidden beach on the gulf of Thailand, inaccessible to tourists, it sounds like paradise. But what follows is a hip, drug-laden, grown-up version of Lord of the Flies. Chapter titles read as if torn from a breezy tourist guide: “Getting there” and “Beach life”.
The Enchanted April
Elizabeth von Arnim, 1922
Italian holidays get more than their fair share of literary attention but this uplifting novel is unmissable – reading it is almost as good as taking a holiday oneself. It begins with an advertisement in the Times: “To Those Who Appreciate Wisteria and Sunshine. Small mediaeval Italian Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be Let furnished for the months of April.” A comically assorted group of women fetch up in the castle where each finds a happier version of herself. And because this is consummate gardener Elizabeth von Arnim writing, the castle’s garden is an Eden.
Hotel du Lac
Anita Brookner, 1984
The hotel on the shores of Lake Geneva is, in a sense, a school. At least, it is the setting in which Edith Hope, an unmarried English woman in flight from an improper love affair, endures a sentimental education, spending her nights in a “veal-coloured” bedroom. Summer is almost over and each day contains “the seeds of its own fragility”, as if in sympathy with Edith herself. The novel won the Booker prize in 1984 and has not lost its melancholy power nor its unassailable elegance. It is the most autumnal of holidays with a low-season heroine.
The Go-Between
LP Hartley, 1953
“The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” This is the opening line of LP Hartley’s haunting novel about the heatwave summer of 1900 when 13-year-old Leo Colston visits his friend Marcus in Brandston Hall, a country house in Norfolk. When Marcus falls ill, Leo gets caught up in a relationship he does not understand, delivering messages between Marcus’s beautiful older sister, Marian, and Ted Burgess, a tenant farmer. It is about a dawning sexuality coinciding with humiliation and a tragic fall from grace. The weather eventually breaks with metaphorical force.
The Summer Book
Tove Jansson, 1972
After the disturbance of many of these “holiday” novels, Tove Jansson’s novella reassures. Six-year-old Sophia and her grandmother have a gentle, philosophising relationship as summer unspools on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland. It is at once idyllic, busy and engagingly real (it begins with the grandmother searching for her false teeth amid the peonies). It is possible to ask huge, idle questions about life and death and not to worry too much about the answers. “On an island,” the grandmother says, “everything is complete.”
