A Colourful Crowd: Minor Characters in the Novels of Nigel Balchin

In the first article in this series I discussed some of the principal characters who populate Nigel Balchin’s fiction. This time I want to draw attention to his minor characters, those bit-part players who may only be granted a walk-on role in the story but still make an indelible impression on the reader.

Balchin deployed his minor characters with care and skill: in many cases, they are there to add colour and variety to a book and to stop the narrative from becoming too uniform. Another important function they perform is to provide much-needed comic relief in the midst of some rather serious subject matter. The best way to illustrate these aspects is by picking three notable Balchin novels and dissecting the minor characters within them.

Fittingly, let us start with Balchin’s best-known book, The Small Back Room, which is chock-full of memorable characters, both major and minor. In Sammy Rice’s working quarters, the small back room of the title, reside Tilly, a statistician in thrall to his calculating machine (he was apparently based on a real statistician, Patrick Slater, a wartime colleague of the author), and Joe, a lead-swinger who is constantly phoning up his wife in preference to doing any work. These three are nominally supervised by Rob Waring, an advertising agent in civilian life, whose job it is to sell the bright ideas produced by the back-room boys. Waring, a devious, self-seeking careerist, is one of Balchin’s best creations. He theoretically reports to Professor Mair, an eminent but vague “grand old man of science”, and almost anyone who has been to university will have come across someone similar. One of Mair’s “star pupils” is Corporal Taylor, a stammering fuse expert who is driven half crazy by the flightiness of his wife and who was movingly impersonated in the film version by that fine Irish actor Cyril Cusack.

Although he is employed partly as a technical device in order to interweave several disparate narrative strands, the dapper civil servant Pinker (“He always looked as though he’d just had a hair-cut”) is worthy of at least an honourable mention in this context because of the amusingly Machiavellian way in which he conducts his business affairs:

“I’ve done damn’ all in this war except to arrange to get fourteen incompetent nit-wits flung out of important jobs.”

Finally, there isColonel Holland, perhaps the best among an impressive roll-call of minor characters. A Blimpish stick-in-the-mud (“If he had his way we should just be coming on to the rifled musket about now”) played by Leslie Banks with obvious relish, and the adornment of an eye patch, in the movie, he pours withering contempt and scorn on almost any new weaponry development brought to his notice. In the novel’s opening scene he neatly lays bare the principal drawback of a prototype anti-tank gun:

“They [tanks] don’t like being shot at and they try to get out of the way. They don’t just drive in a straight line posing for their photographs while you shoot at them with your bloody contraptions.”

In Mine Own Executioner Balchin again takes great pains to establish the characters who people the working environment described in the book, in this case the Norris Pile Clinic, which dispenses free mental healthcare to patients who cannot afford to pay for it. Thus we meet Dr Garsten, a cynical but wise old bird convincingly portrayed on the silver screen by John Laurie. As well as Felix Milne, the novel’s principal figure, the other staff at the Clinic are the bumbling and hapless principal Norris Pile, the serious and predictably icy Dr Phyllis Snow, the highly excitable Dr Tautz, a vigorous proponent of what he describes as “active technique”, and, best of all, the lay-analyst Paston (“an ignorant quack”) who exclaims “Ah-ha, very significant!” in a meaningful tone whenever one of his colleagues commits a Freudian slip. Garsten considers that such a charlatan has missed his true vocation:

Paston’s proper job is writing articles about Sex for the gutter Press.

Lefage, the coroner who only appears fleetingly at the end of Mine Own Executioner during the inquest into the death of Adam Lucian, is undoubtedly the funniest minor character in the novel. What might otherwise have been a relatively dry courtroom scene is considerably enlivened by the excoriating wit and accusatory tone of this gentleman and consequently the inquest is one of the most memorable parts of the book. The character of Lefage was superbly brought to life in the film by Lawrence Hanray, and the producers were lucky to sign him up when they did because Hanray had died by the time that Mine Own Executioner opened in the cinemas.

The Fall of the Sparrow also contains a splendid raft of secondary characters. When the novel was first published, some book reviewers felt that one or two of them were a little overdrawn; this may be so, but they certainly provide plenty of entertaining moments. Heading the cast is General Pellew, the combustible father of the central character, Jason, who tends to fly into a rage on the slightest pretext and is eventually committed to an asylum having gone mad and started shooting at all and sundry out of the windows of his house. Then there are Jason’s Cambridge friends: the college aesthete Simon Grieves, first glimpsed wearing pale blue velvet plus fours and carrying a pet snake known as “The Tempter”; and Arthur Laidlaw, a prissy and unattractive bore who is the butt of much humour in the novel. Rather unusually for Balchin, and this will be the subject of the third (and final) article in this series, The Fall of the Sparrow also plays host to a batch of good female characters. These include Jason’s prickly Jewish girlfriend Leah, his wife Kathy, a gold-digging socialite who comprehensively fleeces her husband during their short-lived marriage, and his wonderfully stuffy and snobbish godmother, Lady Peasmore, who contributes the definitive comment on Laidlaw’s physical appearance:

‘Ghastly,’ said Lady Peasmore. ‘Quite ghastly. The mere recollection of his face…’

One peculiarity of Balchin’s novels, which I believe has been unremarked upon until now, is the presence in them of numerous minor characters with amusing behavioural quirks or “tics”. There are three fine instances in Mine Own Executioner alone. The first is provided by Grandison, Milne’s solicitor at the aforementioned inquest, who is imbued with the beguiling habit of inflating his cheeks and then tapping them sharply with his hands, like a man bursting a paper bag:

Mr. Grandison blew himself into a paper bag and then exploded himself.

The second example is Tautz, the demonstrative Austrian psycho-analyst from the Norris Pile Clinic (“About five feet two and completely round”) who bounces excitedly at the knees every time he speaks. The final member of the trio is Sir George Freethorne, chairman of a trust fund who visits the Clinic to discuss the provision of a donation:

Norris Pile came in, leading Freethorne like a genial elephant piloting a depressed giraffe.

In addition to being tall, thin and stooped, Freethorne’s personal eccentricity is that he makes a curious motion with his jaws, like a man chewing gum, whether or not he is eating at the time.

Markovic, the Yugoslavian police chief from In the Absence of Mrs Petersen*,is another character with a nice line in odd behaviour. His peculiarity suggests that he should be treading the boards of the music halls as opposed to interrogating Jim Petersen, the British scriptwriter who unwisely becomes mixed up in some dodgy escapades in Cold War Eastern Europe:

I said, ‘I spent last night, or most of it, lying unconscious in some bushes about five miles out of Belgrade.’

He repeated, ‘Lying in some bushes five miles out of Belgrade?’

He said it rather in the manner of the ‘feed’ man of a pair of comedians, who repeats the question so as to allow the comedian to make a joke.

On a related note, there are also a number of occasions in Balchin’s novels in which extremely minor characters behave in very peculiar ways, like diverting side-show attractions. One of the best examples occurs in The Small Back Room, when Sammy Rice encounters a disturbed individual in a pub:

There was a lot of conversation going on at the table behind me. Somehow it sounded queer so I looked round, and saw that it was just one chap talking to himself. He looked quite all right—sane and so forth, and as he talked he leaned forward and knocked the ash off his cigarette like people do when they’re arguing. He was a big, dark man about fifty, rather well dressed, with a light grey Trilby hat. I don’t think he was English.

He said, “But why go to Amersham? It only means more trouble.”

Then he said, “You don’t see the difficulty. If we hadn’t gone to Amersham, how were we to keep in touch with Fred?”

Somehow it seemed rude to sit there and listen—much ruder than it would have seemed if there had been two people talking, so I drank up my beer and came away. As I came out he sat back and laughed. I suppose the chap he wasn’t talking to had made a joke.

(It is fair to assume that Balchin, who had a phenomenal memory, stored up snippets of overheard conversations such as these and plugged them into his novels at appropriate junctures. There are other examples in his fiction that would seem to have been taken directly from life.)

Some authors pay great attention to their central characters, to the obvious detriment of the minor ones. It is almost as if the former are rendered precisely in oils and the latter are just roughly (and hastily) sketched in pencil on the canvas. This is not so with Balchin. He clearly devoted considerable mental energy to the creation of the lesser lights who inhabit his books and thus they emerge as fully-fledged three-dimensional characters. Balchin planned his novels meticulously, often taking seven or eight years to work out every detail of a book:

The basic ingredients of the story are shoved in a mental oven. I take the lid off now and then till I find it’s cooked.

Perhaps the trouble that he took with his secondary characters is one way in which Balchin resembles a Victorian novelist, to whom he was compared in an obituary in the Guardian the day after he died. There is certainly a hint of Dickens in the depth and variety of Balchin’s dramatis personae and this flair for characterization has left us with a rich panoply of well-rounded and memorable minor characters.

*I seem to remember a minor character in one of Balchin’s novels who leaves a prolonged pause before he speaks, rather in the manner of a man “receiving a message on an internal telephone exchange”. I thought this person appeared somewhere in the pages of In the Absence of Mrs Petersen but prolonged study of that book has failed to reveal him. Perhaps someone would be kind enough to put me out of my misery and tell me where this individual comes from. Profuse apologies in advance if he turns out not to be a Balchin character at all, but I think he probably is. Author’s Note (2013): he is called Commander Lewis and is a naval officer who appears in The Fall of the Sparrow.

© Derek Collett 2011