Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1977. (It has always puzzled me that books can be shortlisted for the Booker in their year of publication, sometimes before they’re even published – but, of course, the award is totally fair and impartial, of course.) And (breaking out of parentheses) I can hardly point to Quartet in Autumn (1977, UK) as evidence, as it’s apparently unlike Pym’s previous work (so much so, she’d been unable to sell a novel for fifteen years).

Letty, Marcia, Norman and Edwin work in an office for a company in London. They have worked there for many years. The novel doesn’t explain what they actually do – although apparently the rest of the company, as well as the author, have no idea either. All are in their sixties – in fact, the two women retire halfway through the novel (women retired at 60 until 2010). You see what Pym did there with her title: “in autumn” means the “autumn” of the lives of her quartet of protagonists. Clever, that.

The four are lonely and mean-spirited. Edwin is active – although perhaps “interfering” would be a better word – in his local church. High Anglican, I think. Norman lives in a bedsit, and seems to have no hobbies other than the occasional flutter. Letty also lives in a bedsit, and seems the most active and pleasant of the four. When the house she shares is bought by a Nigerian reverend, Letty decides to move. (Some racism here, although Letty does like the Nigerian family.) Marcia is a hoarder, and grows increasingly frail following a mastectomy.

The UK in the 1970s was a mostly grim place. I remember visiting London in 1975 or 1976 (I vividly recall reading a Tarzan annual containing a story in which Tarzan makes a special fireproof suit so he can walk through flames; unfortunately, the covers for the Tarzan annual in 1975 and 1976 are very similar, so I’m not sure which annual it was in). We stayed in a hotel somewhere in the centre, with a shared bathroom on each floor and a TV lounge.

Pym’s depiction of London in 1977 reminds me of that hotel, and the dourness of it all is reinforced by her four characters. They’re petty and narrow-minded. Even the supporting cast – such as Marcia’s visiting social worker, or her neighbours – are snide and contemptible. It makes for an unpleasant read. There’s a thing you sometimes see in British television and films from the early 1960s through to the mid-1970s, especially those set in London, where the city is plainly culturally and politically important globally, but Londoners live small lives of impotence, pettiness and middle-class scrimping. Quartet in Autumn documents the latter but ignores the former. I didn’t like it.