Yasmin Crowther's The Saffron Kitchen

Yasmin Crowther’s debut novel, The Saffron Kitchen, opens with heartbreak. Maryam has lived in England most of her life, but when her nephew Saeed, the son of her sister Mara, comes to live with Maryam and her husband, Edward, after Mara’s untimely death, more than just Saeed comes into Maryam’s life. Maryam begins to remember her life in Iran, her feelings about her family, particularly her estranged father, and the circumstances leading up to her immigration to England. Tension and unhappiness hits the surface one morning with devastating effect for Maryam's daughter's baby. This event prompts Maryam to face the ghosts of her memories, and she returns to Iran to understand what propelled her to leave and why she could never forget her past. Maryam travels to Iran only to discover that the world of Iran that she left many years ago is gone forever, except for one very special person, Ali, her father’s servant who once saved her life. Maryam realizes that she may still be able to capture aspects of her old life in Iran with Ali, but this means sacrificing her English life.

This is a delicate novel about a woman in between two worlds. Maryam is unwilling to forget the past, but terrified to accept the present. She does not feel whole in England and believes that Iran will fulfill her; yet in Iran, Edward and Sara, Maryam's daughter, do not exist. The novel asks two deep questions: is it possible to reclaim the past, and if you can, should you? When she is a teenager, Maryam sacrifices her father’s love because she refuses to follow his directions (which I don’t fault her for), but rather than resisting the temptation to ruin another relationship in her life, she waltzes close to losing Edward and Sara’s love because she will not give up her ghosts and accept the limitations of life. Yet, here, too, I don’t know if I fault her. Maryam’s decisions can either be seen as bullheaded selfishness or desperate decisions made by a woman in a context where women have no such privilege. Though I struggled with Maryam has a character, in the end, I see her point.

Sara, however, makes a different choice than her mother when she paints her kitchen wall saffron, a color associated with the foods and landscape of Iran. Sara understands, where her mother does not, that life is not black and white, or all or nothing; it is a question of mixture. The saffron color brings the world of Iran into her English kitchen. Sara realizes that this is the extent of her experience with Iran: flavor, color, texture, but not life there. Unlike her mother, she is not burdened by memories and hurt, and she does not assume these feelings. Sara realizes she is English with Iranian blood; her mother is not sure where she fits in. Maryam refuses to accept that her past has become something other than a vibrant, breathing thing; a saffron colored wall in the kitchen would only remind of her things she could not have, rather than represent a tribute to her home country.

The end of the novel is ambiguous and somewhat truncated. I wanted more information about the characters, but perhaps that is the point. These deep questions of pasts, homelands, and family are not easily answered, and I would have thought less of the book if Crowther had ended the story with a moral. Despite the ending, and some concern with the similarity between character voices, which worked itself out by the end, this was a thoroughly enjoyable book.

Barbara Pym's Excellent Women

There are writers that discuss tragedy, rape, ruin, war, and devastation. Their books ruminate on the dramatic, life-altering, and singular events that for many people make great reading. Then there are the writers that map real, everyday life onto the pages of a novel. They do not discuss the list above because how often do these things really happen to most people? Instead, they create worlds where we can investigate our own ‘small’ dramas and learn how humanity interacts in the parlor, rather than imagining what one would do on a battlefield. The most famous of this type, of course, is Austen. Napoleon waltzed his war machine through Europe, cutting wide swaths of horror in his wake, arguments over law and the colonies filled Parliament, but Austen included relatively nothing of these worldly happenings. Her villains were not generals or tribal leaders, they were the sorts of people that sit a dinner party, sip their Madeira, and cut you like a knife with their heartless irony. Austen, and Pym after her, instructs us that drama exists on the living room scale. Every dinner party has the potential to play out like a dramatic Russian roulette, and these dramas are really the most important ones.

Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women follows Mildred Lathbury, a woman who is unmarried but very useful. She lives near the local church, helps the curate with his women problems, sorts clothes for the jumble sale, makes tea for the neighbors, and tries to be as nice as she can. Mildred is our old Aunt or the nice lady that checks your books back into the library, with a “did you like this one, dear?” comment and a smile on her face. When the Napiers move in and Father Julian, the curate, strikes up an unsuitable (everyone in the neighborhood knows it’s unsuitable) relationship with a widow, Mildred is present because of her good sense, and because she has the time. After all, she’s not married, you know.

The dichotomy drawn between married women and unmarried women is clear. Miss Lathbury tells us at the beginning that we are not to confuse her with Jane Eyre, meaning that she is not to be found at the end of this novel with a ring on her finger, though as the story progresses I wonder if that is what she really wants after all. Multiple references are made to “the excellent women”, the women who are unmarried, selfless, kind, and, oh, can keep their kitchens tidy. Pym makes an obvious, almost sloppy, distinction between married and unmarried women on the state of their kitchens. The point is that the excellent women are thoughtful and clean. The married women are selfish and opportunistic. Allegra Gray, the woman who tries to catch Father Julian, is beautiful but wrong for him. After she leaves Julian, it is discovered that her kitchen is a wreck, with half empty food tins and a month old cake in the larder. This will never do.

The examples of marriage that Miss Lathbury presents are unacceptable, and I don’t wish these situations for her, but I do think that by the end of the novel she wants something else besides ‘excellence’. She wants companionship with a man. When Everard Bone, though he is arrogant, asks her to come over for dinner and she declines because she wants to know his motives before she accepts his offer, she worries for days that she should have gone over and cooked for him; she worries that he will not be able to handle himself in the kitchen, and she feels guilty for refusing him.

Pym’s characters are real and interesting, but not run of the mill in a modern, dramatic sense. These are church ladies, mostly, so if you’re looking for the type of scandal that makes even Jane Austen interesting, there is not much here. Though, to give Pym credit, we do get whiffs of adultery and inappropriate commingling under the same roof, but it’s all very proper and appropriately explained, you see, by Sister Blatt or someone else like that.

This is a wonderfully British book, and the more I think about it now, the more I like it. It is subtle and charming, a great book to read with tea and a biscuit. A book very clearly from a different generation, but, as with all great and timeless books, there is much to be learned about human relations from it.