Paul Newman −          Cornish Interest      

LOVING AND LOATHING IN CORNWALL 

Where the philosophy of many novels is embodied in the notion of characters acting to change things for the better, or sometimes the worse, Myrna Combellack’s Penaluna’s Van is about living and hurting together, a great deal of that taking place on the Toldhu Estate where cracks lengthen in the walls and people queue for dole and family allowance while dreaming of the transformations a win at Bingo or the lottery might bring. Not so the central character, Lois, whose bosom pal is Marjorie, the wife of the small-time wheeler-dealer, Penaluna. These two affectionately berate and criticise each other. Skinny Lois is stupid because she insists on having babies who will bind her even more tightly to her squalid, leaky council house and intermittently incarnating Swedish husband, while plump, handsome Marjorie is equally addled to maintain her marriage to Penaluna when she could, if only she summoned the courage, walk out on it and start a new life in London. Eventually she does just that and becomes swallowed and stricken in the great city, never to return to her native land. (Nice to think London retains the same potent, corruptive power that it had in the 19^th century when it morally tainted the son of Michael, the stout-hearted Cumberland shepherd of Wordsworth’s poem). Naturally Lois grieves the loss of her friend as she grieves many − too many perhaps − other things: her abandonment of her teaching career, the loss of her first love, Cousin Davey, her abrupt, unsatisfactory affair with a young doctor and, above all, marrying the dogged, earnestly solicitous, yellow-haired Swede, with whom her character is always at odds and who wishes to take her back to his native farm. Constantly her mind broods and reflects on these things and at times her soliloquies attain something of the depth and texture of a more disgruntled Molly Bloom. Quotes from The Waste Land are also enlisted, infusing the shopping trolley ordinariness with literary loftiness and reminding us that Lois has passed her A-levels and is mindful of irony.

In this comedy of tragic acquiescence, emphasis is on reflection rather than action. Hence narrative satisfactions tend to be on the lean side, but they include the donation of a sofa and food mixer, a drawn-out pregnancy, the merest snatch of a love affair and some letters from London. The central symbol, Penaluna’s sun-coloured van, does not play a crucial role, so one presumes it embodies a kind of dilapidated integrity in that Penaluna, initially portrayed as a feckless, unreliable husband to Marjorie, vindicates himself as a dogged, reliable Cornishman who represents a more solid type of virtue than many of the nomads and deserters who pass through.

Although Myrna Combellack’s novel is restricted in range, it has a raison d’etre hard-won through the distillation of bitter experience. Mysteriously it calls itself ‘post-Lacanian’, hinting at the suppression of woman’s rights through man’s illicit appropriation of the structures of language and permissible thought − heavy stuff for a tract of 130 pages! Essentially its message is that of Isaiah and the great pastoral poets: that, as men and women fade out and die, the collective or ‘natural’ will of the species renews itself with the unerring vitality of a field of potatoes. The tragedy lies in Lois’s consciousness that self-knowledge is only won through error and misadventure. Whatever wisdom she shows has been acquired at the cost of her happiness. That women have been biologically assembled with a purpose in mind cannot be shunned and Lois inevitably succumbs to the phallic imperative and its joys and horrors. Totally different from the commercial sagas of high seas and mining adventures, Penaluna’s Van is a contemporary novel of locality that blends stoic lyricism with a porous, easygoing compassion and an honest acknowledgement of the need for domestic comforts and commonplace graces that keep body and soul intact. Two ordinary, exceptional women, Lois and Marjorie, are shown fighting and loving, coping and caring and trying to survive in a cussed, radon-raddled environment that stirs up a truculent pride and violent attachment. Writers may leave Cornwall but it never leaves them.

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