Mary Joyce, A Novel: John Clare’s Muse by Russel C Carter

27 Sep 2009

Mary Joyce, A Novel: John Clare’s Muse

Russell C. Carter

Blenheim Press, Paperback, 100 pp., ISBN 978-1-906302-12-2. Price: £9.95

Edward Randell

In 1841, the 47-year-old John Clare, England’s greatest nature poet, walked from High Beach Asylum in Essex to Northamptonshire in search of the woman he called “my dear wife”, Mary. But Mary Joyce of Glinton was dead – and had never been his wife.

The story of the woman with whom the mentally ill Clare became increasingly obsessed ought to be an intriguing one. Unfortunately, this self-published effort by Clare enthusiast Russell C. Carter is hopelessly incompetent on almost every level. Despite the title, it reads less like a novel than the literary equivalent of a historical reconstruction from a low-budget documentary. Carter has clearly done his research (that much is clear from the plethora of irrelevant dates, names and facts) but seems to have had trouble making the imaginative leap into fiction. He hurries between narrative events with little time for character development; although the story is ostensibly told from Mary’s point of view, Carter does not hold to this with any consistency, and it is never clear what the position of his narrator is. Does he share Mary’s 19^th-century attitudes? If so, how does one account for a phrase like “It was an open and shut case”? If not, how to explain his unreconstructed attitude towards gypsies? In fact, the liveliest and most convincing part of the novel is the epilogue – narrated in the first person by Clare’s wife Patty – which does not suffer from such an identity crisis.

Carter’s prose is flat and bloodless, oscillating between cliché and jarring formality (why “emporiums” when “shops” would do?), as well as being clumsily ungrammatical and riddled with typos. Perhaps most disappointingly, though, this book has very little to do with Clare’s poetry. While we are told repeatedly how much Mary loves Clare’s books, Carter never shows her engaging with them directly, and not a word of Clare is quoted (perhaps because Eric Robinson still holds the copyright on his work). Clare’s poetry is rich in evocative Northamptonshire dialect and a powerful sense of place; Carter’s gratuitous facts and figures, and approximate attempts at rural 19^th-century speech, are no substitute. Consequently, even the most ardent Clare devotee is unlikely to find much to enjoy here.