Elizabeth Mavor’s A Green Equinox is an intricate gem of a novel about love, art, and self-discovery. The prose is stunning—every sentence feels like it’s been crafted with care.

This was a surprise. Like too many novels, A Green Equinox, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and then fairly quickly forgotten, so we should be grateful for Virago for republishing it again 50 years on. A Green Equinox is bonkers and captivating, Its preoccupations - queerness, shifting identities and sexualities, plague - seem very 21st century and Mavor's free-flowing, extravagant and allusive writing style does them more than justice. It somehow seems both of its time and well ahead of it and as such is a remarkable find. Let's hope that its rediscovery will more than compensate for having been overlooked for so long.

Thought this was so interesting - unlike anything I’ve really ever come across before, and I’m glad it’s being given attention again.

I can’t believe this novel is as old as it is - it read as so fresh and contemporary. The central relationship is obviously the driving force, but the characterization is so strong as well. I would love to read more by this author if more of her work is republished!

This is quite the queer gem! the writing is excellent - super witty and funny, as well as descriptive. The first half I flew through, but I found the plot to go a little haywire in the second half which made me less interested. It's definitely a product of it's time, but a worthwhile read if you're searching for queer (especially sapphic) classics.

a really odd, sometimes unsettling, often funny, always unpredictable read—i don't know that i enjoyed it (or that i was meant to), but i do always like to read a republished book.

this book felt really delightfully surprising in the first half, and the prose is so compulsively, brimmingly gorgeous that it's lovely to read. it manages to have a real grip on itself text wise, always flirting with being too much, too purple, but its playful enough that that's lovely. the plot gets away from itself a bit and i found myself a bit ??? why do i care ??? but it's a nice, solid novel!

Elizabeth Mavor’s unsettling novel centres on Hero Kinoull who runs an antiquarian bookshop in the small, English town of Beaudesert (beautiful wilderness), she lives alone with her cat, and leads a fairly uneventful life. She’s having an affair with married, curator Hugh, brought together by mutual dislike of anything too new or modern, but even that connection is more rooted in routine than passion. Then Hero meets Hugh’s wife Belle a crusader for causes from famine relief to environmental preservation. In a series of convoluted twists and turns Hero becomes infatuated with Belle, but ends up falling in love with Kate, Hugh’s exceptionally capable mother.

Mavor shifts between Hero’s first-person and stretches of third-person narration dealing with the characters around her. There are flashes of acid wit and startling imagery, as well as an array of striking, surreal scenes but these are surrounded by an excess of ornate, frustratingly mannered passages – the baroque style reminded me of another recently-resurrected writer Rosemary Tonks and her operatic approach. There are also copious references from Shakespeare to Freud to Thomas Love Peacock, and to religion through Belle’s faith and Kate’s Edenic garden.

As a novelist, Mavor has been compared to Irish Murdoch, close friend and Mavor’s former tutor, if nothing else they seem to share an interest in fiction as a vehicle for the philosophical. Mavor is tangling with complex questions here: from gender and embodiment to sexuality and intimacy to moral responsibility. Despite the surface emphasis on volatile, personal relationships, Mavor sometimes seems to be constructing something closer to allegory than realism, linking Hero’s fast-paced, sentimental education to broader notions about life and how to live.

Fear of contamination in a variety of forms is a recurring theme. Mavor’s story’s filled with jarring juxtapositions and weird events suggesting a world turned upside down. This is an England in flux, where taken-for-granted social and cultural norms are suddenly up for grabs: Hero and Hugh’s beloved art is being degraded, turned into designs for shower curtains and table mats and sold to the masses; middle-class mothers like Belle are rejecting literature in favour of reading paperbacks and political campaigns like nuclear disarmament; the town’s landmarks are endangered; and the nearby hospital is staffed by people with strange “Asiatic faces” apparently disrupting an otherwise white environment – Hero’s numerous observations about race made me extremely uncomfortable. Hero’s ordered existence is upended by a series of incidents from a violent car crash to a bizarre, typhoid epidemic, traced to tins of dodgy corn beef, that sweeps through the town – a variation on the 1964, real-life Aberdeen outbreak. This is a challenging piece to sum up, I can’t say I liked it and I found Mavor's underlying arguments confused and confusing. But it could also be strangely compelling mainly because it's just so incredibly odd.

Elizabeth Mavor's 'A Green Equinox' is a quietly brilliant novel contending with issues of the passage of time, the pretence of Arcadia, and the nature of love through following the affairs of the protagonist, Hero, over the course of six months in a small English village. It's revelations of how love can change you, lead you into pretence, or blind you to pain, set amongst Rococo artworks and beautiful landscapes evokes and updates the classical and mythological canon which Mavor so skillfully weaves throughout her narrative. Mavor considers Arcadia for the 20th century, reckoning with the passage of time and with previous artistic attempts to recapture or picture these classical idylls, and slowing fragmenting and breaking down the pretence of perfection through exposure to 20th century problems. Although a slight novel easily read in one sitting, this is a classical epic for our times.

The dramatic incidences which drive the plot forward and redirect Hero's affections are, however, a little tiring in their unrealistic, dramatic sequence of life-altering events: car crash, outbreaks of infectious disease, fire, drowning. It is somewhat unbelievable that all these could occur around one person in the course of six months and so removed me somewhat from the sensitive and nuanced articulation of Hero's changing affections. It would, perhaps, have been more interesting to see how Hero's changing affections as she moves between her various affairs propelled the story onwards, rather than requiring these external forces to do so.

Nevertheless, Mavor's writing is exquisite. Her ecological metaphors for the aroused body, for the passage of time, and for the pretence of Arcadia within this village drama is brilliant and makes for compelling and beautiful writing that feels just as relevant today as when it was written -- if not more so. It is certainly a book to return to over and over, with which one should feel the passage of time that Mavor so adeptly captures.

Thank you to Virago and Netgalley for the free ebook in exchange for my honest review.

A Green Equinox is a book that enticed me fully from the very first page. It’s a book that feels quite understated, perhaps one you might call slice-of-life, but the poetry in its language means that you’re compelled throughout.

The story follows a love triangle of sorts: firstly our protagonist, Hero, who is having an affair with Hugh, but who subsequently meets Hugh’s wife Belle and falls in love with her. But then, to complicate matters further, she meets Hugh’s mother, a formidable woman she finds herself falling for too.

Even though there are still 4 months left in the year, I would have to rank A Green Equinox as one of my favourite reads of 2023. There’s something about it that draws you as a reader in, intoxicates you, until you find yourself devouring the remainder of the book in a single sitting, however much you might have tried to savour it. As Hero finds herself obsessing over Kate Shafto, so too do you find yourself obsessing over the book in general. This is a narrative carried by its characters and they are, Hugh’s patheticness aside, entirely compelling, in a kind of upper-middle class English kind of way.

To be perfectly honest, this is a book I’m struggling to find words for. It’s one of those that, in order to understand, you have to experience it first. This is a book which you need to read in multiple sittings, to best mull over the words and characters. It’s one to be taken slowly and steadily, to resist the urge to binge it in a single sitting (an urge I, indeed, succumbed to in the end). And then, maybe, one to be reread over and over.

This book was meh. I didn't know what to expect but had hopes reading reviews. But I just didn't gel with the way it was written.

I had no idea what to expect in this novel, and read it, not expecting much. I found myself quickly seduced - enchanted - by the writing style and the characters. The wit of Hero, the playfulness in the writing and in the words spoken. I was drawn in, and without thinking about it, spent most of an afternoon reading the book til its end.

(spoilers)
There are a fair number of dramatic episodes and brushes with death throughout the book, that struck me as sudden, and I wonder, would such a series of episodes have felt sudden/unexpected in the period? Was it intentional for the story for it to feel as such? As someone I know said, sometimes it's good to just enjoy the ride without overanalyzing things, and although I'm tempted to analyze the story for now I will just say I enjoyed the ride. It felt like an allegory for life, and through Hero's romances, a story of growing up as well. In the end she seems to be the wisest one, or at least the person with the most abundant life experience. A real joy to read.

(Thank you for the ARC, Netgalley!)

“ She was fair, big- breasted and scrubbed. Nordic. What virtuous nourishment would ooze obligingly from those globular breasts. Mine were trim and neat and rakish, because they’d been used only for making love and not feeding children. Their aureoles were turkey brown as befitted an adventuress, while hers, I knew, for all that they should have gone brown bearing children, would still have the sucked pink look of uninterfered-with virginity.”

“ Hughie, who beneath his teasing exterior is just as wolfish an enemy of the times as I am, is constantly rub- bing it in that I’m really a monster of destructiveness, that I would actually prefer all that is left now to fall into a picturesque decay rather than that the beautiful ancient, which I adore, and which I believe can only be the inheritance of the Few, and of those Few, only the very Few, should be dolled up and given a face-lift for the benefit of the disgusting Many.”

I just can’t with this book. I’m not sure if it’s sheer genius, or just utterly bonkers. I imagine the author was well ahead of her time and it was brave a piece of writing, but just not my preferred style to read.