A Story of Love Denied

During the dry, hot June of 2000 I found myself at an Edward Thomas study weekend at Madingley Hall in Cambridge engaged in an intemperate debate with a fellow who insisted on denigrating Thomas’s incoherence as a philosopher, which I felt was about as fair as criticizing Maradona’s abilities as a submarine captain. Keeping a lid on this increasingly silly exchange was the weekend’s leader, a softly spoken and impressively moustachioed poet and academic called Jem Poster. Jem was blessed with extraordinary patience and tact. He coaxed us down from our respective teetering ledges by diverting our attention towards the delicacy of Thomas’s natural imagery, a subject upon which my tormentor and I could only agree, so that in the end neither of us felt as though we had either won or lost.

I haven’t seen Jem since, but his kindness and perception in all matters stayed with me. When, in 2002, I saw that his first novel, Courting Shadows, had just been published I bought a copy immediately, feeling that his sensitivity would surely be suited to fiction. My usual policy is not to read books written by people I know in case they turn out to be awful, so you can see that my faith in Jem was strong. As it so rarely is, my faith was justified. Courting Shadows is a terrific psychological thriller set in the Victorian period and following the moral journey of an arrogant surveyor, John Stannard, as he works on the restoration of a medieval church in a small, remote English village. It has Gothic undertones, a climax that reaches a high emotional pitch and a cast of compelling characters. More than this, the book touches on several important and popular seams in English fiction. The main plot concerns Stannard’s tragic affair with a local girl, Ann Rosewell, and carries hints of Thomas Hardy, as well as J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country, in the mingling of church architecture, landscape and doomed desire. There are echoes too of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman in the meeting of Victorian morality and modern sensibilities. The novel’s historical accuracy is also informed by Jem’s background as an archaeologist, which puts it comfortably in the same camp as other successful historical thrillers of the time, such as Iain Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpost (1997). In short, it has everything going for it – pace, passion and a sure sense of its place in the mainstream. Bring on the Booker Prize, one would have thought. Booker Prizes there were none. There were some excellent reviews – Julie Myerson in the Guardian wrote, ‘As a psychological thriller it’s as close to wonderful as anything I’ve recently read’ – but there were no awards, no TV adaptations, not even a place on a bestseller list. It has been a source of wonder ever since its publication that the novel never found a wider audience, and after much head-scratching I have concluded that it must be to do with Jem’s brilliant characterization of his protagonist. John Stannard is fully realized, a complex, credible human being – and utterly unsympathetic. As the book is narrated by Stannard in the first person, there is no escape from him. The least of Stannard’s faults is his snobbishness. The unnamed village in which he is staying is a place of ‘deadening mediocrity’ and he regards the villagers’ attitudes as ‘too primitive to be susceptible to rational argument’. He considers himself to be a representative of a new efficient world, unswayed by the vicar’s sermons on human compassion and unwilling to give sick pay to a labourer hurt due to Stannard’s own negligence so as not to encourage malingering. He regards the labourers’ qualms about disturbing family graves as superstition and views the discovery in the church of a doom painting, a medieval mural depicting the Last Judgement, as less an archaeological miracle than a slightly creepy nuisance. Unlike the reader, he is oblivious to the symbolism of this discovery, which occurs just as his tragic flaw becomes clear. This flaw is Stannard’s spectacular lack of self-knowledge and his denial of his own desires. On his first sight of the gorgeous Ann Rosewell, he remarks that ‘I have always prided myself on my measured response to feminine beauty’, all the while expounding on her radiance, the ‘unusual darkness of her hair and eyes . . . relatable to something deeper’. His emotional naïveté is both touching and horrifying, a humanizing flaw that gives rise to the central drama. He does not understand his own responses to Ann, on the one hand dismissing her as a simple local girl and on the other clearly deeply in love with her. The result is not ecstasy but fear of committing himself to something that he cannot rationalize:

The barest touch of her fingertips against my knuckles before she broke away . . . it struck me that some tacit compact had been made between us at that moment. I experienced a fleeting tremor of anxiety . . .

It becomes clear to the reader that Ann is far more intelligent and emotionally mature than Stannard gives her credit for, and that she truly sees a future for them. She also physically desires him and it is this that Stannard, with his conventional mistrust of female sexuality, can’t manage. When he and Ann finally consummate their relationship, on a rainy night on a hillside above the village, he describes it as ‘a sorry tableau illustrating man’s subjection to the flesh’ and blames Ann for luring him into the perils of sex: ‘I was, I feel justified in saying, an unwilling accomplice, caught up in a whirl of events I was barely able to comprehend . . .’ It is, unfortunately, not a surprise that a Victorian gentleman, finding himself acting against the moral laws of the time, should fall back upon the stereotype of the woman as temptress to excuse himself. He confects a suspicion that she only wants him as a means to bettering herself. Like any Victorian gentlewoman, she sees the need for a good marriage, but the fact is that Ann loves Stannard and has sex with him not to entrap him but in the hope that it will cement their relationship. He reacts by falling into a long fever, which he blames on the weather but which is surely a physical manifestation of his feelings of degradation, and his denial of any responsibility for an act that has all too predictable consequences for Ann. It seems that his reckless negligence doesn’t only extend to his workers. Stannard’s deeply flawed character reveals insights into not only Victorian morals but also a strain of victim- blaming misogyny that persists today. This is a psychological thriller based on that trusty perennial, men’s fear of women, and Poster expertly uses his characterization of Stannard to explore how primitive anxieties, embodied in the doom painting and the crumbling graveyard, lie beneath the brittle façade of rational modernity. The shockingly violent climax does not, alas, bring a happy conclusion. That’s not to say, though, that this book is entirely dark. The character of Ann is wonderfully drawn – she is by turns naïve, shy, passionate and driven – while the supporting cast of the vicar, wary of Stannard’s improvements, and the sceptical labourers provide plenty of ironic observations that puncture Stannard’s arrogance. It is in the gaps between these warm, humorous and humane characters and Stannard’s perception of them that the drama flourishes. This is very much Jem Poster’s modus operandi. He now writes novels and writers’ guides in collaboration with Sarah Burton, and in their The Book You Need to Read to Write the Book You Want to Write they emphasize the importance of character as the driver of plot. They also write that if you want to make your characters feel real, ‘the writer, as well as the reader, needs to be curious about them’. Your characters should always surprise you and you should give them the freedom to act unexpectedly. In John Stannard and Ann Rosewell, Jem Poster has given us two characters who surprise themselves and each other, as well as the reader. Stannard is a man who barely knows himself and reveals by f lashes his terrible psychological flaws to everyone including, finally, himself. There is a hint of redemption as, sitting on the train that carries him away from the village for the last time, he sees from the window a young couple and their child:

just for the barest instant I was swept up and outward by the force of my own perception, knowing it all as though I were part of it – the texture of the glowing brickwork, shared warmth of flesh and breath, the eloquent geometry of love.

This tiny epiphany glimpsed through a train window reminds me of Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’ and takes me back to Jem’s sensitivity to poetic nuance that persuaded me to climb down from my high horse back in June 2000. Stannard climbs down off his even higher horse in this moment, which just goes to show that Jem knew what he was doing all along. Courting Shadows is a brilliant performance, and while it might be too late for a Booker Prize, surely a Netflix limited series isn’t out of the question?

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 88 © Chris Saunders 2025