Tobit Transplanted by Stella Benson (1931)

This novel was originally published in America the year before, under a different title. It was Benson's apparent apogee, winning the Prix Femina. It is most definitely graced with her incredibly original point of view in spades. The characters are strange mixtures indeed of obsessions, oddities and verbal and psychological tics, the grace point being Benson's capacity to see into those states, reason them out, feel sympathy and empathy for them, and relate them to ordinariness - to her mind, we're all odd, really, as much as we are predictable, that is! This is the story of Seryozha Malinin and his family, dispossessed Russians in Manchuria after the revolution (called White Russians) and their struggle to survive, communicate, thrive in a locale where they don't quite exist legally. His father, Old Sergei, is recently blind. His mother, Anna, a woman of strange unconsidered intensity, rules the uncertain roost. Seryozha meets up with Wilfred Chew, an Anglo-obsessed Chinese lawyer with a layer of inherited Christianity from his time in the Temple in London and his wanderings chaperoning petty British officials subsequently. They head off into Korea on a mission to retrieve an old debt of his father's, but get waylaid along the way by meeting the Ostapenkos: a blustering and wordy father, Pavel, a dutiful and buckled-under mother, Varvara, and, most particularly for Seryozha, a beautiful, original, and fascinating daughter, Tanya. Tanya, it seems to me, is most like Benson herself. She has been growing a reputation as Death itself, having had seven suitors who have all been rejected for one reason or another, a couple of whom have killed themselves, the others going into voluntary exile to get away. She has an intense fear of physical touch, little empathetic response where the usual channels should be followed, and loads of it where her original mind leads her, for animals, and for people and even circumstances in strange ways. She puzzles people, and scares them. Somehow, and it's a bit of a sore point that we don't really know how, Seryozha wins her over. There is comedy by the bucketload by the waysides of this crazy progress, and poignant observation, too. As a revelation of just how widely coloured and multifarious this world of ours is, as a delineation of Benson's deeply original understanding of the human mind, this is as intriguing as ever. There is what appears to be an editing error in the logistics of the final scene as Seryozha and Wilfred arrive home with his new bride which is quite glaring - Wilfred reports on events which, to all appearances, he hasn't been present at, to Anna, who was there. He is mentioned in a very offhand way in one sentence as having been around. It feels wrong, almost like Wilfred was cut out of the action and then sellotaped back in. A minor downer on a nevertheless typically fascinating journey.