The Book of Ebenezer Le Page
We review the revived classic by G.B.Edwards, 'The Book of Ebenezer Page.'
Written by Alison Prince
Friday, 15 February 2008
2,847 views 
1 comment
This extraordinary classic has just been reprinted by the inspired publishing wing of the New York Review, and is hugely welcome. My own battered Penguin copy, dating from 1984 and picked up in a second-hand shop, is a cherished possession, but few people now are aware of this unique novel. For islanders in particular, it has great resonance, as it is set in Guernsey, and has an intimate eye for the rich mixture of kindness and scandal, survival and humour, that makes any island work.
It’s almost impossible to believe that the book was not spoken into a recorder by some plain-speaking native of the Channel Islands, but in fact its author, although born in Guernsey in 1899, left the island in 1917 when he was called up. Later he lived on the fringes of the literary set, lecturing for the Workers’ Educational Association and then drifting from place to place in the West Country until his death in1976, before his book was published. Through his chosen character, Ebenezer, he expresses his loathing of the changes that came over his island following the German occupation during WW2, turning it into a tourist resort and tax haven. As John Fowles put it in his introduction to the original edition, ‘It is only the very old now who can fully understand this: what it means to have known, in the one lifespan, both a time when city streets were full of horses, the car not yet invented, and a time when man stood on the moon.’
Ebenezer Le Page lives and breathes, even though he is invented. His voice is actual, irresistibly audible in the mind. Here he is, talking of the day when his sister Tabitha decided to return to live with him.
The Sunday was a happy day. It was just Tabitha and me again. It might have been the old days when my father was alive. I told her what I had done with the sovereigns [he buried them under the apple tree, because of the threatened invasion] and she laughed. … She said, ‘The Germans won’t get either of us.’ She sounded so sure I believed it. She cooked me a darn good dinner; and in the afternoon we sat on La Petite Greve and made stones bounce on the water like when we was kids.
Edwards grew up speaking the near-French Guernsey patois, and his mind is full of people. Whether they are remembered or made up is impossible to know, but his laconically sketched-in portraits are full of life.
My cousin Mary Ann had set her heart on a white wedding, but La Prissy said, ’mon Dou, but you wouldn’t have the cheek, you!’ so the bridesmaids was in white, but she wore a blue dress cut loose and with a long train. … Her father had given her a cottage in the Robererie with a vergee of land and a greenhouse.
Tenaciously old-fashioned, Ebenezer is ferociously critical of the loss of the old, island-centred ways and the incursion of the tasteless larger world. ‘If you talk to people nowadays, nothing exists unless it has been seen on T.V. … It is the deadliest drug on the market. They go sky-high if the boys smoke pot. It is perpetual pot for the millions of goggle-eyed addicts who watch it nightly.’ And yet, Ebenezer is more than a grumpy old man. ‘I wish I could live my life again,’ he says on the concluding page of his book. ‘I have judged people. I do not want to judge people. I want to bless.’
The reclusive author himself may have been blessed by the fact that he never saw his book published, or knew he had written a classic. ‘The mere thought of having a public image appals me,’ he wrote to a friend six months before his death. But his book lives on.
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by G.B.Edwards
Published by New York Review
RRP £10.99
ISBN 978 1 59017 233 9
Friday, 15 February 2008
2,847 views 1 commentThis extraordinary classic has just been reprinted by the inspired publishing wing of the New York Review, and is hugely welcome. My own battered Penguin copy, dating from 1984 and picked up in a second-hand shop, is a cherished possession, but few people now are aware of this unique novel. For islanders in particular, it has great resonance, as it is set in Guernsey, and has an intimate eye for the rich mixture of kindness and scandal, survival and humour, that makes any island work.
It’s almost impossible to believe that the book was not spoken into a recorder by some plain-speaking native of the Channel Islands, but in fact its author, although born in Guernsey in 1899, left the island in 1917 when he was called up. Later he lived on the fringes of the literary set, lecturing for the Workers’ Educational Association and then drifting from place to place in the West Country until his death in1976, before his book was published. Through his chosen character, Ebenezer, he expresses his loathing of the changes that came over his island following the German occupation during WW2, turning it into a tourist resort and tax haven. As John Fowles put it in his introduction to the original edition, ‘It is only the very old now who can fully understand this: what it means to have known, in the one lifespan, both a time when city streets were full of horses, the car not yet invented, and a time when man stood on the moon.’
Ebenezer Le Page lives and breathes, even though he is invented. His voice is actual, irresistibly audible in the mind. Here he is, talking of the day when his sister Tabitha decided to return to live with him.
The Sunday was a happy day. It was just Tabitha and me again. It might have been the old days when my father was alive. I told her what I had done with the sovereigns [he buried them under the apple tree, because of the threatened invasion] and she laughed. … She said, ‘The Germans won’t get either of us.’ She sounded so sure I believed it. She cooked me a darn good dinner; and in the afternoon we sat on La Petite Greve and made stones bounce on the water like when we was kids.
Edwards grew up speaking the near-French Guernsey patois, and his mind is full of people. Whether they are remembered or made up is impossible to know, but his laconically sketched-in portraits are full of life.
My cousin Mary Ann had set her heart on a white wedding, but La Prissy said, ’mon Dou, but you wouldn’t have the cheek, you!’ so the bridesmaids was in white, but she wore a blue dress cut loose and with a long train. … Her father had given her a cottage in the Robererie with a vergee of land and a greenhouse.
Tenaciously old-fashioned, Ebenezer is ferociously critical of the loss of the old, island-centred ways and the incursion of the tasteless larger world. ‘If you talk to people nowadays, nothing exists unless it has been seen on T.V. … It is the deadliest drug on the market. They go sky-high if the boys smoke pot. It is perpetual pot for the millions of goggle-eyed addicts who watch it nightly.’ And yet, Ebenezer is more than a grumpy old man. ‘I wish I could live my life again,’ he says on the concluding page of his book. ‘I have judged people. I do not want to judge people. I want to bless.’
The reclusive author himself may have been blessed by the fact that he never saw his book published, or knew he had written a classic. ‘The mere thought of having a public image appals me,’ he wrote to a friend six months before his death. But his book lives on.
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by G.B.Edwards
Published by New York Review
RRP £10.99
ISBN 978 1 59017 233 9
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PS If you send me an email I can send you an attached article I wrote about novel and novelist.