The narrator in Clare Boylan's new novel is that most typical and delightful of Boylan creations: the innocent yearning for experience but not quite knowing just what kind of experience. Rose lives with her two elder sisters, Bridie and Kitty, in genteel poverty; their mother is a curious creature at once fey and pragmatic, their father is mercurial and unwilling to keep a job for long.
After plans to emigrate to New Zealand or Britain fail, an advertisement is placed: "Room for a single lady. Twelve shillings per week." Although the plan to take a lodger originates with Rose's father, the far-reaching consequences of the curt ad result in a subtle gender struggle that at times almost suffocates the house. It is, Rose tells us, "a woman's house. The visiting men were an entertainment and an education." Into this atmophere of claustrophobic womanhood enter yet more women.
First there is Selena Taylor, who introduces the girls to the idea that having a man to yourself is an unlikely but heavenly idea, and to a fleet of enchanting country myths and ways. When Miss Taylor moves on, there is always someone to take her place: Ruth Kandinsky, a lumpen and bespectacled Communist; Sissy Sullivan, so enchanting to the girls with her artificial silk drawers, slovenly ways and air of glamour; and Minnie Mankevitz, a furious little enreneur who fizzes with a desire to provide for her slow husband Mo.
Boylan weaves these women in and out of the lives of the girls, providing a neverending supply of humorous events and consequences. Rose, Bridie and Kitty are fascinated by these dislocated lives, always looking for someone or something to model themselves on, and Boylan plays cleverly with her various models of womanhood. As she moves her plot along smartly, she simultaneously delivers a composite picture of life in the 1950s, when women's options are severely limited but whose capabilities seem limitless. The central and most intriguing female character is the girls' mother, a woman whose deference is curiously powerful. This model of femininity is counterpointed by Ruth's abrasive independence, Minnie's lovelorn ingenuity and Selina's hidden strength.
The anecdotes of the lodgers are interspersed with hilarious and often vaguely surreal subplots, such as Uncle Bernard's plan to catch a burglar on the mail train by hiding himself in a mail sack for two months, and Father's short-lived job selling household robots door-to-door. Slow and subtle, the Rose sisters grow up, influenced by the paying guests and also by the poverty that constantly haunts their childhood.
Rose herself remains curiously unchanged by the years and everything seems to happen to those around her without changing her narrative voice. Room for a Single Lady would have benefited if Rose had been allowed some of the turmoil and development of the other characters, with a resulting change and maturation of voice. However, if a narrating character is to be stuck in one mode, it is good that it should be one as entertaining and perceptive as Rose's.
With Room for a Single Lady, Clare Boylan has produced an enormously entertaining and involving novel, even though it does not have a strong and compelling plot. Rather, the reader is kept from complacency when a new twist or incongruous detail is thrown into the mixture, and saved from boredom by the fondly sketched characterisation. This is a world where characters are comic but not two-dimensional, resulting in a composite and complex society at the book's uneventful but satisfying end.
Louise East is a journalist and critic