THOMAS GAGE
(Published by Jonathan Cape in October 2003, and in paperback by Vintage in 2004.)
Synopsis:
As one is writing one book, it is reassuring to have some notion of what the next will concern. I was about half way through The Temple of Optimism when our local antiquarian pointed out to me a grassy mound in a field. It had been, he said, the turnpike barrier and keeper’s cottage for that section of the A40. And the reason, he continued, that there is no direct railway line from Oxford to Cheltenham – the gradients are easy for most of the way – is that a great landowner along the route would have nothing to do even with the idea of a railway. Instantly I wanted to write a railway novel.
Then I began to notice a man in the supermarket: a distinctive, shambling fellow with a shopping list drawn up in a woman’s handwriting. I saw this man so regularly that I began to wonder about his wife, who was obviously an invalid. Far from it! One day they were together, clearly husband and wife, and she was a strapping, handsome woman, perfectly capable. Thus the character of Thomas Gage began to form itself.
The reviewers tended to see him as a self-indulgent squire of fleshly appetites. I had someone more complicated in mind: the soft, fat, slow, happy man who is always being taken advantage of by circumstances, which, as it were, invariably see him coming. Men despise him, women adore him. ‘Oh, but he doesn’t count,’ says Mrs Farrant when warned off Thomas by her husband. Such a man will be sensitive to everything – the weather, colours, women’s clothes, hurtful remarks. He will love his children too fully, will be careless with money. He lets himself be preyed upon by women, and when the going gets rough…
Here is Thomas in Chapter One:
“The money was newly warm against his ribs. Swinging his cane, his feet turned out like a dancing-master, humming and hatless, he strolled down St Martin’s Lane and into Trafalgar Square. His hair, which seemed to burst out of his head and was the first thing anyone noticed about him, rippled in the summery breeze.
A woman of a comfortable age came walking towards him, a wicker basket on the crook of her arm. She drew level, and he made her a smiling bow, because he’d done what had been asked of him, the day was glorious and life his to command.
He’d been obstinate, had stood out for every last penny…Oh, it had been a game alright. Roberson had tried to make him feel like a provincial, ignorant and wormy. ‘Do what you like up there. Ninety days’ credit for London trade, plus the usual forgiveness,’ the man had said. ‘Sixty if you want to keep our business,’ he’d replied. He’d braced his calves and stiffened his jaw. ‘Sixty, as it always has been with our firm.’ Then he’d insisted he receive the debt in bank-notes and counted them twice, under Roberson’s nose, despite the fact that it was indecorous. And there they were, plumping out his London frock-coat, which had been cut three monarchs ago and was no longer easily buttoned…”
I deal with the early period of the railways, when 3rd class travelled in open wagons. (The book ends with the funeral of the Duke of Wellington in 1852.) This was a time when the steam engine aroused doubt, derision and finally excitement. Thomas never gets as far as the excitement. He dislikes all that he sees of the new order of things. In his opinion speed is “uncivilising, injurious to the arts and harmful to the whole scheme of human intercourse. It was obvious to him that only mischief wanted to travel as fast as possible.”
The setting is north Norfolk. It’s similar in many ways to Caithness, where I do much of my writing. I chose it so that I could describe the fantastic landscape and cloud formations (which are so distinctive in all the east coast counties of Britain).
An entrepreneur named Julius Gooby proposes a railway from Norwich to Cromer. The only practicable line for it must cross land owned by Thomas Gage (or rather by his wife, who is the one with the money, from a family paint business). This is the key that overtly turns the novel, the most straightforward motive of all – to gain possession of something from another person. But actually it’s Thomas and not the land or the railway that’s the point. How will he cope with the tragedy that befalls his family? Will the women who love him offer him succour? Will he let them? How will he regain his happiness?
I had a couple of corrosive reviews for The Temple of Optimism, mainly because my publishers compared me with Jane Austen. Nevertheless, it sold very well and goes on selling steadily. For Thomas Gage, on the other hand, I had reviews that were universally respectful. It’s a much better book than my first, a far more profound fiction. But it has sold poorly by comparison. Perhaps people can sense that there’ll be fewer opportunities for laughter. Perhaps the word ‘optimism’ in the title was what won me readers for TofO. I don’t know. Thomas Gage will come good some day. A writer has to believe in himself or there’s no point doing it.
Here are the Reviews:
9 October 2004 -: “Thomas’s sorry diminution from cheery, philandering patriarch to laudanum-quaffing spectre is handled with great skill, as is the subtextual tension between red-cheeked English pastoralism and red-toothed English industrialism. Fleming is a good all-rounder, his satisfying characterisation and plotting matched by a pronounced talent for simile and nature writing.”
1st November 2003 -: “The account of Gage’s decline might have been merely morbid, but is leavened by the energy of the writing. Both the dark and the lighter elements of the novel are informed by a linguistic and imagistic freshness suggestive of a writer prepared to take risks in articulating his complex vision…The overriding impression is of a fertile imagination combining with a wealth of detailed knowledge to produce a work of considerable power.”
26th December 2004 -: “ Historical fiction got a shot in the arm when James Fleming began publishing. The bluff Norfolk hero of Thomas Gage is a harmless relic from the age of squires, a Waterloo veteran who falls foul of progress: it is marvellous.”
10th October 2003 -: “ A puritanical view insists the novel must deal only with the contemporary world. Well, goodbye War and Peace and Middlemarch. The value of an imagined past is that the novelist can make an extended metaphor for our times and show that our lives, like our forebears’, are every moment laying mines and traps into the future. The writer may use any material, including what George Eliot called “the varying experiments of Time”. Fleming’s experiment works very well indeed.”
19 October, 2003. John Spurling –: “Settled happiness is difficult to write about without being boring. James Fleming, however, tackles it with such confidence that the gentle sunlit prelude of Thomas Gage lasts half the book. Indeed, this Norfolk idyll of 150 years ago is so delightful, so skilful in its mixture of historical detail, mild social satire and Norwich School landscaping that it makes the reader increasingly anxious. There is one little dark cloud in the distance – the possibility of a new railway being built through Thomas Gage’s land – but surely the author does not really mean to bring serious grief to these nice people…?
It is a lesson to us all. Comfortable circumstances and the geniality they sometimes nurture…are no protection against the cloudburst when it comes.
This is an old-fashioned sort of novel – well-fashioned, well characterised, wryly and suavely written, and very welcome.”
The Author and Thomas Gage as imagined by Alison Lang in the Sunday Times.
11th October 2003 -: “At the heart of James Fleming’s second work of historical fiction is a personal tragedy that is as intricate and resounding as the prose that evokes it…Fleming’s subtle characterisation and beguiling descriptions of pre-industrial England make the poignancy of subsequent events all the sharper. This sensitive exploration of a man’s mind and how market forces impinge on it offers further proof that Fleming is engaged in challenging the conventions of a genre that is open to charges of escapism. There is no escape for Thomas Gage from the uncertainties of history or the ruthlessness of greed and social progress.”
25 June 2004. Sue Baker :– “Thomas Gage is caught on the cusp of old and new, when railways are changing everything. Stocks and shares are taking over from old-fashioned savings and life will never be the same again. Either Fleming is a brilliant historical novelist, or he has travelled back in time, taking notes, spying on Gage, his family, friends and enemies to create this utterly convincing nineteenth-century portrait.” Made Book of the Month also by Sue Baker.
1st November 2003 -: “A bleak, gripping story which has all the pessimism of a latterday Thomas Hardy…One of Fleming’s strongest cards is his ability to surprise – repeatedly. There are certainly some great characters here. There is Isabel, Thomas’s wife, an austere woman who has brought him a comfortable income from her father’s paint firm…But having given him two children, she has – how shall I put this – closed her bedroom door to him. Her decision will prove fateful.
There is the lawyer, Leonard Lutwylch, who effectively runs the family firm. He has great power, but can his loyalty be trusted?
There is Julius Gooby, a man of the future, manager of the proposed railway…an arch-manipulator, with the ability to read people all too well. But how far will he go for his railway?
And Jammy Peach, the simple and illiterate servant in Thomas’s house, whose greatest ambition is to “better himself” by becoming a guard on the new railways. His success in learning to value timetables and rulebooks will also play a key part…
The story merits a book twice as long. Maybe that’s the best compliment to Fleming, as a writer.
11th october 2003. Eric Anderson –: “Fleming writes lyrically about the countryside and almost as well about the Victorian town. His gallery of characters ranges from new men like the unctuous railway manager, Gooby, and the upwardly mobile lawyer, Lutwylch, to the country boy who leaves home to work on the railway and finds that old notions of loyalty have to yield to commercial necessity. Fleming is best of all, though, at the moments of stress and elation, in the chapters where young Fred Gage is fighting for his life, where his father is infatuated by the vulgar Nina, and in the final scenes which bring two lives and an era to their end.”
