Analysing a novel: Susan Hill's Strange Meeting.

English students at all levels, but particularly at GCSE, A Level and Undergraduate levels are faced by the challenge of close textual analysis or ‘Practical Criticism’ as it used to be known..fondly !! For it is a blind date in literary terms and used to form the whole basis of A Level paper 3.

For some students and readers this challenge is great fun and much pleasure can be derived from ‘working out’ how a text/piece of  text functions and impresses.

For others, the ‘task’ of analysing a text is at best hard work, and perhaps a little daunting,  at worst, frequently written off and declared ”BORING”!

Many times I ban the word ‘boring’ from tutorials and seminars,  simply because it is such a negative anchor. What benefits can be derived from such a label which is linked to such an unhelpful set of responses..or none-responses? 

The concept( if it is even this)  ‘boring’  kills thought!It also murders the very process of careful consideration of the effect of langauge upon a reader or listener.

Of course it can be helpful( and can work) to consider why a set of words, assembled together in a particular way may ‘bore’ an audience. But very often the term is an unexamined, ‘dead’ cliche, whose only effect is non-thinking.

So let’s think about a set of words and how they might have the capacity to make us think and make us think about why we trust and care about ourselves and others.

Let’s think about intimacy and friendship. Let’s look at Susan Hill’s Strange Meeting.

The first time I read this I cried ( and the second!) and for me, it is one of the best things in Susan Hill’s excellent book set during the First world war. it has its own music and pace. Like breathing and relaxing into the words and the release that friendship can bring.

Why do we relax with some people and find talking so natural?

Why do we yearn for connection and this sense of release through being with another and talking openly and without fear of judgement?

So here we are with a small extract from Susan Hill’s novel Strange Meeting, a text often paired up with Wilfred Owen’s poetry and Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration.

‘Tell me,’ Barton said simply. He still lay on his stomach, hands dabbling gently in the water.His legs were very long, reaching back through the grass towards Hilliard.

He had been waiting for someone, just as Garrett had waited for him. Waiting for Barton. Though he had not known it.Long ago, he would have talked to Beth. Not now. There had never been anyone close enough.

‘Go on. Tell me.’

Hilliard did so. It was not so difficult after all.’

( Penguin, p57)

I will analyse this in my next blog!

Janet Lewison