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blackoxford's review against another edition
5.0
There’ll Always Be an England
The saving grace of the English is that they don’t take tragedy all that seriously. Recently this has been shown clearly in the process of leaving the European Union. Everyone agrees it’s been handled badly. But very few are terribly upset. Things will work out. Life will go on. In fact life going on means that there will be any number of replacement problems once this one is resolved. There isn’t likely to be progress but that’s never been a reason for despair.
Comyns wrote when the British Empire, really the English running of it, was disintegrating. The Second World War had depleted the resources of the the average household as well as those of the Treasury. Sociologically the pre-war world of fixed class, unchallenged privilege, and institutional isolation was gone. The Mau Mau were rising up, Suez was preparing to boil over, the IRA started acting bolshy in Armagh, and Alan Turing poisoned himself rather than go to prison for homosexuality. Not many reasons to be cheerful in 1954.
But such conditions are soil for the growth of English wit, dry as both the soil and the wit may be. Comyns‘s wit doesn’t promote the blessings of being English, but the blessings of being able to laugh about being English. She starts from a local tragedy, a flood in the house of the charmingly named but somewhat less than charming Willoweeds, and progresses upwards, if that is the right term, to tragedy on increasingly cosmic levels. The haplessness that appears as inveterately self-destructive along the way is simply an English way of coping that has proven itself effective over centuries. Things pass, tragic things especially. Too bad; how sad; never mind.
What lacks among the English generally, and the Willoweeds in particular, is cooperation. Grandmamá is an abusive tyrant, Father a self-confessed layabout, his children (or at least those he admits as his children) are not particularly happy about the family organisation. The staff of cook, maids, and gardener would generally like to be somewhere else. The household, as a consequence, is less than tidy or hygienic even in normal times, however abnormal those may be.
The village in which the Willoweed house sits is filled with eccentrics with appropriately eccentric occupations: Mrs. Fig, the layer-out of the dead; Lolly Bennet, the incompetent dressmaker; the village cobbler/bookmaker, really suited for neither half of his profession, the three old maids with a pet billy goat; the village drunk, Lumber Splinterbones; and the good doctor Hatt, not the brightest star in the medical firmament, even in the days before the NHS.
There is little charm among them and a sort of shared arrogance that the future will be more or less the past warmed over. Which of course it generally is. And when it isn’t, as all the village-folk will recognise at some point, there wasn’t much could be done anyway. So eccentricities are to be respected. If Grandmamá insists on treading upon only her own farmland to attend a funeral, so be it. And so too with the sexual transgressions that everyone is aware but no one speaks about. The disfigured, drunks, and children are taken as different but accepted for what they are. This is all part of an uneducated, native tolerance at the heart of Englishness. But it must never be mentioned.
Tolerance has its limits of course, for example when the villagers start turning from eccentrics into psychotic zombies. When there are more deaths than in any given episode of Midsomer Murders, the social fabric starts to fray noticeably. The most dreaded malady known to middle England threatens - mass hysteria. Such a condition is known in foreign parts to impede the flow of reliable gossip. One’s network is degraded. It also prevents getting things done in the usual way, like the rituals of death. Worst is that panic provokes mutual exploitation, or rather allows whatever exploitation already in play to be made public. Cats break free of bags. The code of English omertà is broken.
I live in Warwickshire, the cultural stage set for Comyns’s story. I think I may love the county almost as much as she did. But English love isn’t necessarily passionate, no matter how intense it might be. It is, rather better said, enduring. And perhaps not spoken about too freely. There are already enough problems that need ignoring. The Avon still floods. The Commonwealth has turned out to be much less troublesome than the Empire. And Teresa May won’t last forever.
The saving grace of the English is that they don’t take tragedy all that seriously. Recently this has been shown clearly in the process of leaving the European Union. Everyone agrees it’s been handled badly. But very few are terribly upset. Things will work out. Life will go on. In fact life going on means that there will be any number of replacement problems once this one is resolved. There isn’t likely to be progress but that’s never been a reason for despair.
Comyns wrote when the British Empire, really the English running of it, was disintegrating. The Second World War had depleted the resources of the the average household as well as those of the Treasury. Sociologically the pre-war world of fixed class, unchallenged privilege, and institutional isolation was gone. The Mau Mau were rising up, Suez was preparing to boil over, the IRA started acting bolshy in Armagh, and Alan Turing poisoned himself rather than go to prison for homosexuality. Not many reasons to be cheerful in 1954.
But such conditions are soil for the growth of English wit, dry as both the soil and the wit may be. Comyns‘s wit doesn’t promote the blessings of being English, but the blessings of being able to laugh about being English. She starts from a local tragedy, a flood in the house of the charmingly named but somewhat less than charming Willoweeds, and progresses upwards, if that is the right term, to tragedy on increasingly cosmic levels. The haplessness that appears as inveterately self-destructive along the way is simply an English way of coping that has proven itself effective over centuries. Things pass, tragic things especially. Too bad; how sad; never mind.
What lacks among the English generally, and the Willoweeds in particular, is cooperation. Grandmamá is an abusive tyrant, Father a self-confessed layabout, his children (or at least those he admits as his children) are not particularly happy about the family organisation. The staff of cook, maids, and gardener would generally like to be somewhere else. The household, as a consequence, is less than tidy or hygienic even in normal times, however abnormal those may be.
The village in which the Willoweed house sits is filled with eccentrics with appropriately eccentric occupations: Mrs. Fig, the layer-out of the dead; Lolly Bennet, the incompetent dressmaker; the village cobbler/bookmaker, really suited for neither half of his profession, the three old maids with a pet billy goat; the village drunk, Lumber Splinterbones; and the good doctor Hatt, not the brightest star in the medical firmament, even in the days before the NHS.
There is little charm among them and a sort of shared arrogance that the future will be more or less the past warmed over. Which of course it generally is. And when it isn’t, as all the village-folk will recognise at some point, there wasn’t much could be done anyway. So eccentricities are to be respected. If Grandmamá insists on treading upon only her own farmland to attend a funeral, so be it. And so too with the sexual transgressions that everyone is aware but no one speaks about. The disfigured, drunks, and children are taken as different but accepted for what they are. This is all part of an uneducated, native tolerance at the heart of Englishness. But it must never be mentioned.
Tolerance has its limits of course, for example when the villagers start turning from eccentrics into psychotic zombies. When there are more deaths than in any given episode of Midsomer Murders, the social fabric starts to fray noticeably. The most dreaded malady known to middle England threatens - mass hysteria. Such a condition is known in foreign parts to impede the flow of reliable gossip. One’s network is degraded. It also prevents getting things done in the usual way, like the rituals of death. Worst is that panic provokes mutual exploitation, or rather allows whatever exploitation already in play to be made public. Cats break free of bags. The code of English omertà is broken.
I live in Warwickshire, the cultural stage set for Comyns’s story. I think I may love the county almost as much as she did. But English love isn’t necessarily passionate, no matter how intense it might be. It is, rather better said, enduring. And perhaps not spoken about too freely. There are already enough problems that need ignoring. The Avon still floods. The Commonwealth has turned out to be much less troublesome than the Empire. And Teresa May won’t last forever.
interrobang's review against another edition
3.0
is this the most fucked up book i have ever read? MAYBE.
merrittk's review against another edition
dark
funny
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
luchiiaa's review against another edition
5.0
Un libro redondo, todo está bien y todo funciona: la trama, los personajes, el ambiente, el lenguaje, el ritmo. Quizás el final pudo ser un poco más contundente, tal vez...
Fue un libro que disfruté muchísimo, de una autora que no conocía y ahora muero por leer más de ella.
Fue un libro que disfruté muchísimo, de una autora que no conocía y ahora muero por leer más de ella.
tjb73's review
3.0
Parts of this book were excellent and overall the writer built a good picture of the scene but often it moved too quickly and jumped around.
ampersunder's review against another edition
4.0
It took me a long time to warm up to this book, but by the end I was rather charmed by it, although that's not the term to use for such a book. It felt slight to begin with but things slowly built up on each other to make it into something more than the sum of its parts. The ending was a tad abrupt and the wrap-up awkwardly cute. I finished it on the bus home from work on Friday but today I'm still thinking about it.
booktwitcher23's review
dark
funny
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
wintakindchen's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0