Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke

There’s a scene in Lord Jim at Home where a man meets a horrific death at sea. We are deep in the midst of WW2, and Giles Trenchard, the main protagonist of Brooke’s novel, has joined the Navy as an Ordinary Seaman. His ship, the Patusan, is under fire from a pair of Japanese destroyers, and the galley has been hit. As Price, one of Giles’ shipmates, tries to reload a torpedo, he is sliced in two at the groin by an enemy shell – the force of which carries the top half of his body over the rail, splashing ‘into the sea for a nice swim’. His legs, on the other hand, remain on deck, held together purely by the trousers as his limbs fold at the knees. It’s a gruesome scene, and yet there’s something mordantly funny about it too, typified by the cartoonish image Brooke plants in the reader’s mind. This tension between the cruelly grotesque and savagely comic is vital to the success of this book. It is by turns witty, merciless, shocking, and repulsive, but the sparkling quality of Brooke’s prose and the singular nature of her vision carry the reader through.

First published in 1973 and recently reissued by the ever-reliable publishing arm of Daunt Books, Lord Jim at Home is an unflinching coming-of-age story, rooted in the brutality of the privileged upper classes. Born in the interwar years, Giles Trenchard is the eldest son of Austin Trenchard, a powerful, austere solicitor and his wife, Alice. The Trenchards live in Cornwall, and Brooke emphasises the mythic, fable-like quality of her story by referring to Giles as ‘the Prince’ while his parents are termed ‘the King’ and ‘the Queen’. Nevertheless, this is a fairy tale of the darkest kind – pitch-black and unyielding like a piece of polished jet.

Bullied and disdained by his father and cruelly neglected by his mother, Giles is starved of love and affection – an abandonment exacerbated by the chilly atmosphere of the nursery, presided over by an abusive nanny who locks Giles in a cupboard by day and straps him down in bed at night.

A child should be quiet and malleable. He should have no desires. He should have no will. (p.12)

Mealtimes are especially torturous affairs as the nurse seeks to exert her control over the impressionable infant Prince. In a scene reminiscent of Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels, the nurse grabs young Giles by the scruff of the neck and dangles him out of the nursery window when he fails to eat his lunch – a heinous combination of bitter spinach and congealed scrambled egg, the latter resembling vomit.

‘Do you want me to drop you? Will you eat your spinach?’ The friendly green lawn swings dizzily below him. There is a bush with yellow flowers growing against the house. It would be nice to dig in the flower bed. Perhaps find a snail or a worm. His legs and arms make tiny kicks in the air. A brightly speckled thrush swoops past him and picks a snail out of the flower bed and dashes it against a stone. (p. 40)

The stays are loosened somewhat when a new, kinder nurse arrives, but much of the damage has already been done, and Giles remains a failure in the eyes of his father. At nine, the Prince is packed off to boarding school, where he continues to disappoint, failing to learn anything despite repeated beatings – if anything, the boy seems impervious to them.

There are times when this novel reads like a vivid fever dream, accentuating the horrors that assail Giles as he tries to survive school, the days dragging on interminably with precious little relief. 

The awful, heavy, black intoxication of sleep, red with black scallops round the edges, like the wings of a butterfly. Rich smell of wood and ink. Ink tastes like blood when sucked from the pointed spoon of a relief nib. Careful not to prick your tongue. The air is thick with dust and heat and the droning of voices. There is no escape, no escape, no escape. (pp. 101–102)

When war intervenes, Giles joins the Navy as an Ordinary Seaman, a life that provides some semblance of purpose and acceptance in the ranks. As you’ll have gathered from my opening paragraph, Brooke doesn’t hold back on her descriptions of carnage at sea – the heat is stifling and putrid, the injuries brutal and swift.

Bodies lie like ghosts, confused at their own life, relieved by sleep. Behind each pair of closed and twitching eyelids, the battle roars and shrieks again. Men struggle endlessly through the same efforts. The images of the day, hard and bright, drag through their dreams like a loose end of film chattering through an empty spool. (p. 161)

But when the war ends, Giles is pitched into a kind of limbo. Back in England, he shuttles between London and Cornwall, repeatedly agreeing to study for his law exams – a condition of the boy’s allowance – only to fail them on multiple occasions. With little money coming in and a girlfriend to entertain, Giles resorts to ‘borrowing’ (aka stealing) money and jewellery from his mother to finance his lifestyle – a practice that lures him into trouble, precipitating the novel’s shocking but horribly believable dénouement.

Brooke has fun with touches of foreshadowing here and there, gently hinting at the horrors to come. At one point, Austin Trenchard imagines pushing his own father off a cliff in a wheelchair, an image that strikes an eerie resonance with the story’s ending. Moreover, there are occasional references to a courtroom scene and reflections from unnamed observers, seemingly commenting on Giles’ character and behaviour – this, for instance, from a fellow broader at school.  

‘There was nothing very noticeable about him.’ […] ‘But I do remember that he would often wake up in the night screaming, or cower into a corner of the room screaming, “Don’t hit me, don’t hit me,” when no one had threatened him at all.’ (p. 102)

All this suggests a judgement is on the horizon, a reckoning of sorts as the story builds to its conclusion. (Interestingly, there seems to be an ongoing preoccupation with aspects of law, order and justice in this book – I’ll be interested in any other observations on this.)

When the novel was first published in 1973, reviewers described it as ‘squalid and startling’, ‘nastily horrific’ and ‘a monstrous parody’ of the upper echelons of society. Fifty years on, the time feels right for a reappraisal. Bravo to Daunt Books and McNally Editions for bringing this unnerving, shocking, savagely funny novel back into print. It might not be to everyone’s taste, but I found it a fascinating and bracing read.