don’t look at me like that (diana athill)

Athill’s novel has that quality of feeling eminently autobiographical, without being autobiographical. We know this from the mismatching dates of birth of the protagonist, Meg Bailey, who is 27 when the Suez crisis occurs, and Athill herself, born in 1917. This then begs the question, what is the quality which lends the book this sense of absolute authenticity, which in turn we are inclined to describe as autobiographical? Don’t Look at Me Like That is a relatively slight book, which spans ten years or so. A coming of age story, at the forefront of the narrative is Meg’s affair with Dick, the husband of her best friend, Roxane. Apart from the fact that the author makes her protagonist the betrayer, rather than the betrayed, there’s nothing radical about the subject matter. It’s domestic, kitchen sink, and the milieu of Britain in the fifties, feels of a piece with this. Post-war London is just getting going again, a city where a young woman can carve out a career for herself if she’s resourceful or lucky, a world of bedsits and rented rooms, of shared bottles of wine at the kitchen table, of turbulent, over-intense relationships crying out for air. What marks the novel out, however, is not the description of place or time, acute those these are. It’s the singular modernity of Athill’s heroine. In two senses. On the one hand, in the sense that it’s rare to see the travails and challenges of being a woman seeking to find a place in the world dissected with such clarity. On the other, in Meg’s psychological honesty, transparency. Meg comes to realise that she is attractive, and she also comes to realise that her attractiveness is a tool she can employ, as well as being a burden she needs to carry. Athill traces the entire journey of this young woman’s evolution, with such precision that at times it’s hard not to feel that this is the voice of the author herself speaking. Pinpointing those moments of awareness, such as when she forces herself to cause a scene with Jamil, the Egyptian lodger who is besotted with her, discovering in the process her capacity to be an active rather than a passive protagonist. Meg’s honesty and clarity regarding sex, both the way in which it was viewed by an adolescent girl (as something vaguely unpleasant, a bridge to be crossed) and something she struggled subsequently to enjoy, in spite of various one night stands, also feels revelatory. You don’t get Virginia Woolf or Willa Cather or Rosamond Lehmann tackling this risky topic with such sangfroid. As such, Don’t Look at me Like That feels ahead of its time. As though literature is a progressive event, one that constantly seeks to address the simple issue of living with greater and greater honesty; in that context, Athill’s novel is another step on that journey, one which stretches into the unknown future.