This extraordinary novel – shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1973 alongside books by Beryl Bainbridge, JG Farrell and Iris Murdoch – has been reissued on both sides of the Atlantic after being out of print for 50 years.
The story covers six months – “equinox to equinox” – in the affairs of narrator Hero Kinnoull, a bookshop owner in the English village of Beaudesert and the lover of Hugh Shafto. Hero’s devotion to Hugh seems unfathomable to the reader – he’s an outrageous snob, obsessed with the past, and devoted to the rococo largely because it “stands for everything the mob detests” – but that’s love for you.
Enter Hugh’s wife, Belle, who invites Hero to a protest about the destruction of an ancient tree in the village (“Now then, ladies!” “Piss off!”). Hugh objects, but by then Hero, under threat from a bulldozer (“I felt extraordinarily excited”), has already begun to see Belle as the reward and Hugh as the price.
But this is nothing so straightforward as a menage à trois. Hero experiences ungovernable urges, erupting symptoms of mysterious origin – “Angina!”, “Wind”, “Gallstones!” – as appearance and reality part company. If the first half of the story is idiosyncratic, the second contains multitudes – including a typhoid epidemic stemming from a badly soldered tin of corned beef – but also operates as a cry for passion and against lassitude.
“Time in its rather shocking way seems to normalise practically everything,” we’re told, and to fight this the characters challenge stereotypes of masculine and feminine in a way that is as much about flouting convention as it is about sexuality and gender. A Green Equinox is a book whose transgressive nature slips by the reader easily through the comedy, colour and final tragedy of its telling.
There is a particular sensibility here – unpredictability, comedy in darkness, turning things upside down in fewer than 200 pages – that recalls Barbara Comyns or Muriel Spark. But most of all this is that rare bird, a novel entirely sui generis, with no clear antecedents and no imitators. It is old-fashioned in the best way: intrepid, eccentric, and not giving a damn.
A Green Equinox by Elizabeth Mavor is published by Virago Modern Classics (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
