Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill

 Somewhere Towards the End cover

Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill was published in 2008 when the author was 89 and she was getting to the stage when her life was becoming ever narrower and she was realising that there were some wishes that were just never going to come to fruition, such as – she was never going to be able to own a pug, she was too old to be able to give them the walks and the care that they need, she says ‘I would so like to to begin that process all over again with a little black-velvet-faced pug – but no! It can’t be done.’ Each to their own I thought, I think those dogs are like marmite, you either love or hate them.

To begin with I thought that this book might be one of those name dropping ones because in no time flat she was mentioning Jean Rhys, but it was just that she had a close professional relationship with her as Athill was an editor at Andre Deutsch, and Rhys had a terrible fear of death and inevitably death is one of the main topics in this book. You would think that that subject could be depressing but it’s actually quite an uplifting book. She was apparently often described as “the finest editor in London”.

I found this to be a fascinating and at times really funny book. She’s quite brutally honest about her relationships with men, and she has much the same feelings about religion as I have. She had no religion, was an atheist but had a Christian upbringing, so had a clear view of right and wrong. However she was one of those people who did whatever she wanted and to hell with anyone else, so her sense of morality where relationships were concerned was pretty low.

‘So we, the irreligious, live within the social structures built by the religious, and however critical or resentful we may be of parts of them, no honest atheist would deny that in so far as the saner aspects of religion hold within a society, that society is better for it. We take a good nibble from our brother’s cake before throwing it away.’

Diana Athill might have thought she was somewhere towards the end of her life but in fact she still had another ten years of it to go and of course wrote another three books after this one. This book was nominated for the biography category of the Costa book awards. In fact I thought that she had died recently but it seems that she is still alive and kicking aged 99.

One thing that really annoyed me was that she mentions that although she had worked with the publisher Andre Deutsch from the beginning, she was very poorly paid. She said she understood that he deserved to take more money out of the company as it had been set up using his money, but she couldn’t afford to buy a house despite having worked for him for donkey’s years – and he refused to pay her any more. Honestly, publishers are just the limit. I bet he wouldn’t have tried that on if she had been a man! Of course in the 1960s and 70s even professional women couldn’t get a mortgage from a bank or building society, if they wanted to buy a house they had to save like mad for years, it’s amazing how much life has changed since those days.

I’m now looking forward to reading Diana Athill’s other books. You can read an interview with her here.

2 thoughts on “Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill

  1. I do want to read this especially since I loved her short story collection published by Persephone. And how infuriating about her salary — and don’t get me started about the inability of women to get mortgages, it makes my blood boil.

    • Karen K,
      I’m sure you would enjoy it. Younger women have no idea how much things have changed over the years for women. In my young day women just expected to be second class citizens – it was normal.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *