Good Morning Midnight by Jean Rhys

Something about this novel reminded me of ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ TS Eliot’s poem of the 1920s about a frustrated bachelor and his inability to ‘force the moment to this crisis’.

While the protaginist of this novel is not a staid bachelor like Mr Prufrock but an eccentric down-at-heel 40 year-old woman, the location is Paris not England but the tone is the same lyrical hysteria present in Eliot’s blank verse masterpiece. This is undoubtedly a moderninst masterpiece.

Indeed Good Morning Midnight does sometimes feel like a prose poem in its heightened language, its linguistic playfulness and its swirling narrative that jumps forward and backwards in time. It is also a sort of dramatic monologue, narrated by Sasha Jensen during a period of drunken isolation in Paris. It is only until the second half of the novel that you begin to understand why she has ended up alone in Paris staying in a succession of anonynous hotel rooms and the reason behind her parlous mental state.

This is a funny, beautifully written novel and there is even a triumphant tone despite the slightly depressing premise of the novel about an unhappy, borderline dipsomaniac alone in Paris.