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Title: The gaudy : a novel by J. I. M. Stewart ISBN: 0-575-01881-X Publisher: Gollancz Pub. Date: 1974 Format: Unknown Binding

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: The first volume of Staircase in Surrey
Comment: J.I.M. Stewart wrote literarcy criticism and mainstream novels under his own name, and popular detective stories under the name Michael Innes. The Gaudy is the first novel in a quartet about Duncan Patullo and his return to Oxford in middle age as a lecturer. Each book in the quartet can be appreciated on its own, but taken together they form a measured portrait of a middle aged scholar in the mid-twentieth century. The Gaudy is the best of the lot, in my opinion, and is usually considered the best novel Stewart wrote. It is in some ways the antithesis of his Michael Innes mysteries: those are brief and action packed and were written in a week(or so it seems), while The Gaudy and its successors owe more to Anthony Powell and less to Agatha Christie.

Duncan Patullo returns to his Oxford college(called Surrey, based on Christ Church) for his year's Gaudy, the Oxonian term for a class reunion. He is a moderately successful playwright, apparently of somewhat old-fashioned taste (there are dismissive references to Ionesco and John Arden). He meets several of his old classmates, including his old friend Tom, now Lord Marchpayne, and spends a great deal of time analyzing his fellow guests. There are scandals and even a bit of excitement, but the plot is really driven by Patullo's interior monologue, similar to those of C.P. Snow's characters, but rather better thought out and written. By the end, Patullo has accepted a post as lecturer in Modern Drama and a fellowship at the college, and the stage is set for the rest of the "Staircase in Surrey" novels, which find Patullo an aging don.

This book was a bit fresher in its invention than its successors, and the plot twists that drive the action, such as it is, are much less contrived than in the other "Surrey" novels. The transformation of a middle aged playwright who has not thought twice about his old college in as many years into a scholar devoted to the place is marvelously described. Stewart had clearly gotten a subject after his heart, and reaches a power of description unmatched in his other work.

Stewart was a Student (fellow) of Christ Church College, and here writes what he knows. A good work for fans of Powell, or Snow, or Beryl Bainbridge, and a good look at the kind of novel that flourished in England from 1950-1985 or so.