‘The Juniper Tree’ by Barbara Comyns (1985) – 177 pages

‘The Juniper Tree’ is based on a gruesome fairy tale of the same name by the Brothers Grimm. Here is a short cartoon video of the Brothers Grimm ‘The Juniper Tree’ fairy tale. Lines from the fairy tale serve as the foreword to the novel.

My mother she killed me
My father, he ate me
My sister little Marlinchen
Gathered together my bones
Tied them in a silken handkerchief,
Laid them beneath the juniper tree,
Kywitt, kywitt,                                            what a beautiful bird I am.

Don’t worry, although in some ways the Barbara Comyns version is faithful to the fairy tale, her novel is not at all gruesome. Instead it is subtly disquieting, plausible, and sometimes unsettling. The stepmother Bella Winter in her novel is a quite likeable English woman whose greatest pleasure is dealing in antiques. Bella has a facial scar caused by a car accident her former boyfriend had. Bella also has her own little mixed race daughter Marline resulting from a one-night stand after she broke up with her boyfriend. Through her work for an antique store she meets and befriends the upper class couple Gertrude and Bernard Forbes who live on an estate which has the juniper tree.

That is the opening framework of the novel, and I won’t give away any further plot information so I don’t spoil it for you. I found this odd novel an enjoyable read as I have also found two other novels by Barbara Comyns. In all three novels her heroines keep up a good front and carry on despite troubling circumstances. It is our audacious heroine Bella who makes ‘The Juniper Tree’ a captivating read. Bella’s positive insight into her situation drives the novel.

One thing that seems a constant in her novels is that the men never come off as acting that well in them. They tend to be insufferable in one way or another. That is certainly true of the two main men in ‘The Juniper Tree’.

Comyns’ ‘The Juniper Tree’ was published in 1985 after an eighteen year hiatus in her writing career. Perhaps it was that Virago began to republish her earlier novels that caused this resurgence. She went on to publish two more novels before she died in 1992.

This novel is a strange mixture of fairy tale starkness and modern social realism, but Comyns pulls it off with élan. In all of her work the freshness of her approach and her simplicity in tackling bizarre or horrific events is impressive.

Grade: A

‘Our Spoons came from Woolworths’ by Barbara Comyns    (1950)   –   196 pages

Perhaps the darkest thing about ‘Our Spoons Came from Woolworths’ is that it was based to some extent on the real life of Barbara Comyns.  When the novel was first published in 1950, she actually wrote a disclaimer on the copyright page: “The only things that are true in this story are the wedding and Chapters 10, 11, and 12 and the poverty.”   The listed chapters are about her horrific experience giving birth to her first child in a public hospital.  The poverty of her early marriage years was all-pervasive.

We have all read or heard romantic tales of the starving artist who lives in poverty in order to pursue his grand artistic dreams.  However we rarely get the picture of the poverty from the point of view of his starving wife with a baby.  The wife and mother must work full time so her husband can stay at home not earning a penny.  Somehow the wife keeps up a good front for the family until the baby gets sick or she gets sick and can’t earn anything.

Barbara Comyns has frequently been call a naive Primitivist, but never has a writer depicted day-to-day grinding poverty in more vivid devastating fashion.  Perhaps what makes it so devastating is that her narrator always tries to keep up a good front no matter how terrible her plight.

“I was pleased he was going to be away now I felt so unhappy, because I knew men hate women when they are unhappy.”

Comyns can leave a sentence like the above hanging, so that its effect is more desolate than if it were explained.

Barbara Comyns deals in realistic fashion with subjects in a woman’s life that were hardly mentioned at that time including our married woman having an affair and then her back-alley abortion. But there is more to Comyn’s writing than her descriptions of sad destitution.  She tells her life in simple and honest terms.

“I was quite glad to see him wearing such stupid clothes.  It made it much easier to tell him I didn’t love him anymore.” 

We have all been in situations like that, even though we usually won’t admit it.  Our narrator in this novel always, always tells the truth even if it makes herself look stupid.  But ultimately she is not so stupid; she is living her life the best she can in an extremely difficult situation.

Grade:    A