WHO today is the most neglected important novelist of the early 20th century? Barry Webb is quite clear. It is R. C. Hutchinson, who was a prizewinner, on bestseller lists, and about whom Sebastian Faulks has said that he stands comparison with Balzac or Tolstoy. Yet, today he is little known.
Hutchinson was brought up in a loving and devout Evangelical home. His mother used go to bed wearing a clean set of underwear in case Christ came in the night. He attended Monkton School, which he loved, despite reacting against its narrow religion. He knew from an early age that he wanted to be a writer and wrote his first novel while at school. Seventeen of his novels were published, each of them very different, as well as many short stories.
His novels are based mainly in war-torn Europe and he had an extraordinary capacity to convey both the atmosphere and tiny details of the places that he wrote about. So marked was this capacity that readers always assumed that he wrote from direct personal experience of the places. One novel based in France convinced readers that it must have been written by a Frenchman, because only someone who was French could think in that kind of way. But, as Webb brings out, the author had not visited the places he wrote about. He wrote them out of his head, in his study, with the aid of meticulous research at the local library. He had an extraordinary imaginative ability to enter into the feelings and situations of others.
Webb tells the story well. Besides telling us about Hutchinson’s life, he gives us the plot of the novels. This is not always easy for those who have not read them, but Webb manages to interest us by focusing on the main themes, with some judicious quotations that bring out the strength of Hutchinson’s writing. Hutchinson himself was happily married with four children and grandchildren, and he spent most of his life doing what he wanted, writing novels, many of which achieved great success.
Having reacted against Evangelicalism, he became an Anglo-Catholic for a while before settling down into mainstream Anglicanism and becoming a churchwarden. His strong Christian faith is mostly implicit in his novels, but his moral vision of human beings made in the image of God is fundamental to all his writing. My sole criticism of Webb’s book is that he has given us only five pages on religion. I very much hope that he might write another book in which he shows how Hutchinson’s moral vision permeates the novels, and the form that it took.
Webb, a former English don at Oxford and expert on Edmund Blunden, has done a great service in bringing Hutchinson and his novels before us. For those who don’t know them, I would recommend to start with A Child Possessed, about a lorry driver in Marseilles who takes his severely mentally handicapped child with him in the cab. Then Johanna at Daybreak, about a Dutch woman who has lost her memory and in the process of recovering it has to face something appalling in her past. After that, there are the longer earlier novels, most of them related to war in one way or another, though Hutchinson, for no obvious reason, also had a strong interest in medicine. The time is ripe for R. C. Hutchinson to be rediscovered. Webb has written just the right book to set the process going.
The Rt Revd Lord Harries of Pentregarth is a former Bishop of Oxford, and an Hon. Professor of Theology at King’s College, London. His latest book is Wounded I Sing: From Advent to Christmas with George Herbert (SPCK, 2024).
R. C. Hutchinson: The man and his writing
Barry Webb
Lutterworth Press £25
(978-0-7188-9799-4)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50
