Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

Taylor, Elizabeth. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. New York : New York Review Books 2021. Print.

First Sentences:

 

Mrs Palfrey first came to the Claremont Hotel on a Sunday afternoon in January. Rain had closed in over London, and her taxi sloshed along the almost deserted Cromwell Road, past one cavernous porch after another, the driver going slowly and poking his head out into the wet, for the hotel was not known to him. 

Description:

This book is a bit of a switch for me. Short, cosy, quiet, not much action. But Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont got ahold of me with its characters and concise writing style and wouldn't let go until the very surprising end.

 

First published in 1971, Mrs Palfrey is the eleventh of twelve novels written by Elizabeth Taylor (not that Elizabeth Taylor), and  was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Taylor, once one of the most renowned of British women writers, seems to have fallen off the "To Be Read" list of modern readers. But with Mrs Palfrey, I stumbled onto her work and was immediately captivated.

 

Laura Palfrey, the main character, is a recently widowed mother to estranged daughter Elizabeth and equally distant grandson Desmond. She recently decided to move into a modest hotel to live out her days. The Claremont was located in London near the National History Museum and other attractions, favorable points in selecting that hotel although Mrs Palfrey and her other permanent residents in that hotel never have the energy or desire to visit these attractions.

 

While the Claremont is a regular hotel with temporary guests, there are several elderly women and one man who have made it their permanent home. Living sheltered lives of gossip, loneliness, and boredom, these residents exist on routines of checking the daily posted menu for each meal, eating, watching a TV serial, and knitting. The sole male, Mr. Osborne, spends his days writing complaint letters to The Times and buttonholing the hotel staff with dull stories and crude jokes. Mrs Burton, another resident, loves nothing more that obtaining drinks at the hotel bar, while the others content themselves with observing passersby on the street and gossiping about the lives of other people.

At the Claremont, days were lived separately. One sat at separate tables and went on separate walks. The afternoon outing to change library books was always taken alone. 

Highlights for each person is a visit from a relative, even though that is usually a matter of obligation for the visitor. Mrs Palfrey has only one grandson, Desmond, nearby who works in the British Museum and has little interest in visiting her. So Mrs Palfrey, alone in her days, by chance meets an impoverished young writer, Ludo, who becomes a friend and even visits her at the Claremont.

 

The trick: Ludo with Mrs Palfrey's insistence, pretends he is her grandson, Desmond, to show her fellow residents that she, too, has relatives who visit her. For Ludo, Mrs Palfrey gives him ideas for characterization of people in the novel he is slowly writing, so his intentions are not altogether altruistic. But for Mrs Palfrey, he is a godsend to her life and her relationship with the residents.

 

Taylor writes this novel as a series of scenes rather than a narrative. Mrs Palfrey is a keen observer of her world and its inhabitants, as well as the motivations and shortcomings of herself and others. While not much happens in the routine world of the Claremont, each page is full of quiet insights into the behavior of people, something I found fully absorbing. Taylor's writing style is compact, straightforward, yet loaded with insight, compassion, frustration, loneliness, and yes, some humor.

Sometimes when I was a young, married woman, I longed to be freed -- free of nursery chores and social obligations, one's duty, d'you know? And free of worries, too, about one's loved ones -- childish ailments and ageing parents, money troubles....But it's really not to be desired -- and I realise that that's the only way of being free -- to be not needed. 

In rereading this recommendation, I'm not sure my enthusiasm for Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont comes through. But let me assure you, if you are looking for a quiet, challenging, people-centered story of quirky, yet very human characters, you cannot go wrong with this novel. Give it a whirl and see for yourself.

  

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:]

Willett, Jincy. Amy Falls Down

An elderly woman stumbles and falls in her backyard, only to awaken in a hospital as a celebrity due to something she recently wrote but now no longer remembers. Her quiet life is soon changed. (Previously reviewed here.)

 Happy reading.

Fred

[P.S. Click here to browse over 500 more book recommendations by subject or title and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader.]