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3.79 AVERAGE
3.79 AVERAGE
I wonder if I would love Barbara Pym so much if I hadn’t discovered her work during the pandemic. She writes so beautifully about things that sound really simple and everyday, like going to a suburb on a bus and going out for lunch, but they’re things I haven’t done for so long, I think I see and appreciate the tenderness and the beauty of it even more. There’s a bit in this where one character is wandering around London feeling lost and then she goes into a church and lights a candle for her former live-in lover who is going abroad on a plane and it made my chest ache. I want to sit on the top deck of a bus and watch the suburbs go by again! I wasn’t as taken with the plot of this as I was by Excellent Women, which exists in the same universe (the confirmation that Mildred and Everard got married....exquisite!) but that doesn’t really matter because I love the way Pym writes and what she thinks is important to comment on and the way her characters talk so much. Anthropology, or at least the anthropology in her work, seems quite weird and outdated to me but I don’t care! It was amazing that she could (spoilers) kill off her romantic lead at the end and still leave the feeling that everything’s going to be okay. I loved sweet Deirdre and Catherine - I want to be Catherine when I grow up! Every Barbara Pym novel I read just further confirms that I completely love her and she is going to be one of my favourite authors ever forever.
I had a much harder time getting into this story of African anthropology students than the other Pyms I've read. I just didn't care about the characters or what happened to them. I loved the phrase "chrysanthemum-cut hair," but then I thought maybe this was just a term for a certain type of '50s haircut? Anyway, still 4 stars, but definitely underwhelming for me.
I suspected and then confirmed that the characters in Less than Angels exist in the same universe as Mildred Lathbury from Excellent Women. In fact, one of the characters actually says, “I’m not one of those excellent women, who can just go home and eat a boiled egg and make a cup of tea and be very splendid, she thought, but how useful it would be if I were! ” Miss Clovis is a definite crossover character from both titles and for careful readers, there is a tiny epilogue for Mildred here which really tickled me.
In Less than Angels Pym turns her anthropological eye in on the English middle class, academics and anthropologists in their “native” habitats. Her humor and observation is absolutely spot on: “ They lived in the meaner districts of London or in impossibly remote suburbs on grants which were always miserably inadequate, their creative powers stifled by poverty and family troubles. It would need the pen of a Dostoevsky to do justice to their dreadful lives... ”
I don’t think that Less than Angels was quite as perfect as Excellent Women, possibly because it lacks the focus of one main character around whom the narrative is structured. In some ways, this this character could be considered to be Tom Mallow, the anthropology grad student who is loved by three women. Tom comes back to London after two years of field work in Africa to write his PhD dissertation. Waiting for him is his girlfriend Catherine and in the wings are his first love, the country living, dog breeding Elaine and undergraduate Deirdre. But there is much more to the book than just a love quadrangle. It is full of subtle humor and poignancy, poking gentle fun at 1950’s life and relationships in London.
In Less than Angels Pym turns her anthropological eye in on the English middle class, academics and anthropologists in their “native” habitats. Her humor and observation is absolutely spot on: “ They lived in the meaner districts of London or in impossibly remote suburbs on grants which were always miserably inadequate, their creative powers stifled by poverty and family troubles. It would need the pen of a Dostoevsky to do justice to their dreadful lives... ”
I don’t think that Less than Angels was quite as perfect as Excellent Women, possibly because it lacks the focus of one main character around whom the narrative is structured. In some ways, this this character could be considered to be Tom Mallow, the anthropology grad student who is loved by three women. Tom comes back to London after two years of field work in Africa to write his PhD dissertation. Waiting for him is his girlfriend Catherine and in the wings are his first love, the country living, dog breeding Elaine and undergraduate Deirdre. But there is much more to the book than just a love quadrangle. It is full of subtle humor and poignancy, poking gentle fun at 1950’s life and relationships in London.
I got a stack of Barbara Pym books from the library because Kerry Clare loves them (and she's a go-to for reading suggestions). This is the second so far and I found myself chuckling throughout. Pym skewers academia (in both books so far, anthropologists) and the habits of humans in general with writing that's clever and sharp but not nasty.
More people should be reading Pym! I just heard of her this year and am now eager to read everything she wrote. Her plots are about small romances and domestic struggles and always seem to have a few church ladies serving tea. Yet, her character studies are both wry and cutting, and her observations about contemporary mores are often spot on and sometimes heartbreaking. It's as if Jane Austen was writing in the 1950s. Read this novel and you'll get a sense of why Philip Larkin nominated her as the most underrated writer of the century.
Another on-the-nose read for me, and I loved it. I've gotten used to skimming over the excerpts from poets/Great Literature that Pym so loves her heroines to reference. The portraits of hapless grad students delighted me. My one complaint was the ending felt rather more rushed than I would have liked.
Just excellent - the author is able to show characters with all their faults and yet make us sympathize with them. It was also very funny in places: I laughed aloud at the scene where Mark and Digby fear they are going to have to treat Miss Clovis and Miss Lydgate to lunch.
Fairly disappointed, not as interesting as the other works by Barbara Pym but it has its moments
This book is an uproarious delight: a comedy of manners, a romantic farce, a send-up of academia and academics, and, almost by the way, a surprisingly subtle meditation on religion and spirituality. The complex personal and professional dynamics (and funding shortages) governing the relationships of the anthropologists are so instantly recognizable that I, as a graduate student in the humanities, howled with laughter, and cringed in sympathy. Pym manages to offer a magnificently vivid snapshot of a cross-section of London life in a specific historical and cultural context, that is also irreducibly human; recommended especially to fans of Muriel Spark.