Review by Rob Spence, 9 Jan 2025
This book, by the strangely neglected author of a number of novels in the fifties and sixties, is another welcome publication from the UK’s northernmost publisher, Michael Walmer. Hugo Charteris, an aristocrat with a military background, left journalism to concentrate on writing novels and screenplays. He published nine novels and wrote for film and TV, including the popular ground-breaking series Take Three Girls. His novel The Lifeline was also republished by Michael Walmer, and is reviewed here.
Pictures on the Wall is a very different proposition to the rollicking comedy of The Lifeline. Here, the setting is a youth detention centre, one of those establishments designed to administer a “short, sharp shock” to its young male inmates, convicted of minor crimes. The central character is Philip Ayrton, the warden, whose idealism is sorely tested by the brutal regime over which he, reluctantly, presides. Ayrton is, the reader senses almost from the opening pages, going through a crisis of sorts, a mid- life repeat of the collapse of faith which had led him to give up his calling as a monk many years previously. The narrative is very much focused on Ayrton’s viewpoint, often describing his existential fears and doubts, and his nagging dissatisfaction with his life at the centre. His wife, Ella, is dissatisfied with her lot too, especially now their daughter is away studying music. But they carry on, in the absence of anything better, more or less accepting of their fate.
The centre is semi-rural, somewhere in the Pennines – Buxton is the nearest town – and life revolves around a fairly predictable routine. But then the little self-contained world is shaken by the arrival at the centre of a quiet, but potentially troublesome young man, Goole, and at the farm attached to the centre, a new female worker, Minty. Ayrton quickly falls under the spell of Minty, and the resultant disturbance, both to his equilibrium, and the life of the centre, forms the central narrative thread of the novel.
Pictures on the Wall is set in 1960, and I was irresistibly reminded in places of Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, which had been published a few year earlier. Hoggart’s book examines the mass culture of post-war Britain, and critiques the loss of traditional forms of expression, and the Americanisation of the youth of the time. Like Hoggart, Ayrton associates the old ways with a more settled sense of right and wrong. Here is Ayrton, musing on Goole’s crime, an assault on a farmer at a pub called The Three Musketeers:
Let the social sciences and industry boom, absorb the best brains and millions every year and let wage packets put easy everything within the reach of the masses, but take away the last vestiges of conventional morality, the old restraints such as proceeded most strongly from the concepts of God, Queen, Country, Work and Family and you were left with the world of fast cars, ads., the Three Musketeers – and the psychologists’ report, in other words not a world at all, fragmentation, chaos, against which the whole army of economists, sociologists and psychologists and welfare officers – would prove no bulwark, not even if they came to constitute a third of the population, which they soon would unless the present trends in statistics could be reversed.
Ayrton’s desperate search for some truth and meaning in his existence leads him to some dangerous places, and forces him to confront some unpalatable truths about himself. Charteris is adept at presenting the anguished contortions of Ayrton’s mind, especially as he is faced with challenges to his settled view of the world.
This is not a comfortable read, but it is a rewarding one. Michael Walmer, in somewhat of a coup, includes a short introduction by David Lodge, whose death was announced just as I was finishing reading, so this might be Lodge’s final publication. In the introduction, Lodge suggests that the novel might be seen as a “period piece”, evoking a particular time and place. That’s true enough: the early sixties milieu is vividly described here, and there are parts of the narrative that are almost social history. But I would venture that there is much here that resonates with our contemporary state, not least in our treatment of offenders and the ways in which our lives are subject to circumstances over which we have little control.
Rob Spence’s home on the web is at robspence.org.uk
Hugo Charteris, Pictures on the Wall (Michael Walmer, 2024), 978-0645751932, 255pp., paperback.
BUY at Blackwell’s via our affiliate link (free UK P&P)
