After years in the wilderness, the most famous-ever novel about Guernsey is back. Shaun Shackleton looks at the phenomenon that is The Book of Ebenezer Le Page and discovers that in America, they can’t get enough of the old sea Guern ‘THERE may have been stranger literary events than the book you are about to read,’ wrote none other than literary giant John Fowles, in the introduction to The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, ‘but I rather doubt it.’
And he wasn’t the only one who appreciated this unexpected blockbuster’s merits.
‘A masterpiece … one of the best novels of our time,’ said The New York Times.
‘Edwards’s book still roars like some huge shell held, cutting, against your ear,’ opined The Atlantic.
But perhaps best of all: ‘To read it is not like reading but living,’ said William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies.
Ordinarily, for a book about the life of a Guernsey fisherman, this would be high praise indeed. But this is no ordinary Guernsey fisherman. This is Ebenezer Le Page: ‘Cantankerous, opinionated and charming.’ Eighty years old and fiercely independent. And this is no ordinary novel.
A story about Ebenezer Le Page could not be written without talking to Edward Chaney, professor of fine and decorative arts at Southampton Solent University and the man to whom G B Edwards dedicated and bequeathed his novel.
In the summer of 1969, after his A-levels, Edward went to stay with his octogenarian aunt in Dorset. After making friends there he went on to Reading University, returning to seasonal work on a nearby farm.
In 1972 a friend of his aunt’s, Elizabeth Snell, mentioned that she had a lodger who seemed to have known D H Lawrence.
Edward’s first meeting with Gerald Basil Edwards was in a village pub. They hit it off immediately and talked for hours.
‘He was very, very forthright and slightly manic-depressive. After I first met him I would visit him for endless coffees and conversations. He was extremely well read and knew Shakespeare and the Bible backwards.
‘He was incredibly well organised and sophisticated.
‘He thought himself back in the past and in the present.
‘He was an incredible intellectual, a Bloomsbury type, but he returned to his roots.’
The relationship strengthened over the years, with Edward constantly encouraging Gerald to complete and publish a manuscript he had been writing and rewriting for years.
In August 1974, Gerald presented him with a large package with a top copy of the typescript. It was called Sarnia Cherie: The Book of Ebenezer Le Page.
In the book, when Ebenezer presents his young friend Neville Falla with his autobiographical journal, he comments: ‘He didn’t thank me for my book; but I swear he knew I had given him all my secrets for him to read some day.’
Is Edward Chaney Neville Falla?
‘I asked Gerald a few times. I was a painter and I rode a motorbike but it doesn’t ring true. I would never smash a greenhouse.’ (In the book, Neville is a painter and motorcyclist and he smashes Ebenezer’s greenhouse.)
He also said that unlike Neville he knew what sort of book he had been given.
A declaration was included stating that Edward was ‘free to get it published if and when you think fit, to own copyright, and to receive whatever emoluments may accrue, without any obligation to me’.
The long and complicated road to publishing the book had begun.
‘I was only 20 at the time. I have some amazing rejection letters from Faber and Faber. Then, in 1976, Gerald died. I did a PhD in Florence and met John Henderson who worked for Hamish Hamilton.
‘He suggested I send it to them.’ It was eventually published in 1981 but later fell out of print for six or seven years, with only a small US publisher keeping it going ’slightly illegally’.
But Ebenezer is back. Last week the book was re-launched at the Press Shop by New York Review Books. Copies sold like hotcakes and at the time of writing stocks were already low, but a new consignment is expected today.
‘It was my moral duty to my old friend to keep people reading the book,’ said Edward.
‘I think other people are greater admirers - I find the ending over-neat. But it is a powerful and emotional book. It made me weep.’
The new edition features a painting on the cover by famous artist R B Kitaj, entitled Blake’s God, and Fowles’s original introduction.
Welcome back Ebenezer Le Page. You would have had strong words to say about it, but you’re in esteemed company.
* The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by G B Edwards is published by New York Review Books.
PLAYING THE PART OF EBENEZER
WHO better to portray Ebenezer Le Page on stage and radio than Guernseyman Roy Dotrice? I talked to the legendary actor at his home in Los Angeles.
Roy and his wife Kay were just about to set off for a two-hour journey to Mexico.
‘We love it down there. As soon as we arrive it’s margaritas and lobster.’
Is it as good as Guernsey lobster?
‘My dear,’ said Roy, ‘nothing is as good as Guernsey lobster. Can you still get them?’
I told him a fisherman friend of mine catches them.
‘And ormers? My father and I used to go ormering. We’d catch the rapide bus from St Peter Port to L’Ancresse. My father would go in up to his neck. Then, of course, the driver wouldn’t let us on the bus because all our clothes were wet.’
Roy first took on the role of Ebenezer Le Page in 1982 when he recorded a dramatised version of the novel in 28 fifteen-minute episodes for Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.
It is rumoured to have been one of the programme’s most popular serials ever.
Why was he asked to do it?
‘Because they realised that I was a Guernseyman and that I could do a Guernsey accent.’
Having lived in Hollywood for many years, I wondered if he could still cut the mustard.
‘Caw dammee, eh!’ he said. (He could.) ‘I loved the bastardisation of English and patois.’
He then went on to speak several sentences, peppering each with English words when there wasn’t a Guernsey-French alternative - exactly the way my granddad used to speak it.
I asked him about the stage adaptation of the book by Anthony Wilkinson - The Islander - staged at the Theatre Royal, Lincolnshire, in 2002.
‘It was a two-handed piece but it didn’t work. I was an old man all the way through and in would come the actress playing Liza Queripel, 16 years old, and I’d be this dirty old man of 90, making up to this girl. It was quite obscene. I expected to be arrested at any minute.’
Despite this, he wouldn’t mind working with Anthony Wilkinson again.
‘I think it could work as a one-man show, if he could write it.’
After returning from Mexico, Roy will make for the UK where he’ll resume his one-man show, Brief Lives, which is still in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most solo performances (1,760 - and counting).
He’ll then go on location in Hungary for the film Hellboy II. Not bad for an 82-year-old.
I tell him about the reprint of the book and that it was highly regarded in America and that now would be a good time to reprise his stage role. He was amazed.
Why does he think that Ebenezer Le Page is so popular?
‘I have an enormous affection for Ebenezer. I love the old guy. I always thought it was such an exclusive thing, him being Guernsey.
‘I could never get it put on in the States. But obviously, as you say, now could be the time. I think it would make a good film.’
I asked him why he loved the book.
‘Because it reminded me so much of home,’ he said. ‘I think it is going to be big this time.’
Article posted on 28th July, 2007 - 12.00am
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