It’s too early to say whether the office is done for. As with any sudden loss, many of us find our judgment blurred by conflicting emotions. Relief at freedom from the daily commute and pleasure at turning one’s back on what Philip Larkin called “the toad work” are tinged with regret and nostalgia, as we prepare for another shapeless day of WFH in jogging bottoms.
But we shouldn’t let sentimentality cloud us. Offices have always been profoundly flawed spaces. Those of the East India Company, among the world’s first, were built more for bombast than bureaucracy. They were sermons in stone, and the solidity of every marble step, the elegance of every Palladian pillar, were intended to speak volumes about the profitability and smooth functioning within. This was nonsense, of course. Created to ensure efficiency, offices immediately institutionalised idleness. A genteel arms race arose as managers tried to make their minions work, and the minions tried their damnedest to avoid it. East India House, in which Lamb worked, could give call centres a run for their money in the art of micro-managing. At the start of the 19th century, the company introduced an attendance book for employees to sign when they arrived, when they left and every 15 minutes in between. Not that it proved much use. “It annoys Dodwell amazingly,” wrote Lamb. “He sometimes has to sign six or seven times while he is reading the newspaper.”
When Shelley Klein moved back in with her father Beri after her mother died, she brought some old furniture with her. He didn’t want it in the house: a Victorian chair would compromise the modernist vernacular, he said. He objected to her pots of herbs, too: putting them on the kitchen windowsill would ruin the rectangular symmetry. They’d had these arguments since childhood, when he stopped her having a Christmas tree. To Beri, the house was a work of art, a gallery for living in, and nothing must detract from its aesthetic.
Designed by the architect Peter Womersley, who became a close family friend, High Sunderland sits in a pine forest on the Scottish borders. A single-storey series of interconnecting boxes, its defining feature is a generous use of glass, which seems to draw the surrounding landscape inside. Klein was born there in 1963, a few years after it was built. She feels “hefted” to the place and used to dread leaving it as a child. Despite travelling widely and spending years in Cornwall, she kept returning, even before her father’s last years. Her book is a homage to the house – and to him.
This is a novel about belonging. The pressure to leave the valley, to find something – anything – somewhere else, is held in tension with the urge to return to its struggling hair salons and gloomy rains, its hillside ruins that resemble “the beginnings of a misspelled word”, where you face the inevitable penalties for your disloyalty. The hollow in the land is a zone of wrong decisions and deaths by misadventure. It’s only 10 miles long but it stretches to fit your life, binding the generations together even as it pulls them apart. You must take these characters as you find them. Without pulling punches or closing his eyes to anything, Clarke makes it possible to do that, in a novel full of insight, empathy and wry laughter.
They, like all creatures, being made
For the shovel and worm,
Ransacked their perishable minds and found
Pattern and form