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A review by verityw
To Bed With Grand Music by Marghanita Laski
5.0
I loved this so much. So much.
Deborah, our protagonist, is dreadful. She's a terrible, terrible person but you just can't stop reading about her. At the start of the book, she and her husband Graham are in bed together ahead of his departure to Cairo to do war work. On the very first page Graham says he can't promise to be physically faithful, but promises not to fall in love and not to sleep with anyone who might fill her place in his life. He asks her to promise the same. But Deborah doesn't take him up on this offer - instead she swears that she will be faithful to him and to not act on any attraction she feels to another man. Deborah does not keep her promise...
In fact Deborah is a mistress of self-justification and can pretty much turn any situation around so that in her head she can justify what it is that she wants to do as being right. Soon after Graham's departure she's bored in the countryside and decides that the best thing for her would be to move to London and get a war job, leaving behind her son with the housekeeper come nanny - because this would make him happier because although he'll see less of her, he'll only see the best of his mother. Thus the tone of Deborah's self-delusion is set.
I think Deborah is pretty much impossible to like, but instead you're fascinated by her progress as she slowly abandons all her standards and rules and manages to rationalism absolutely anything if it means she can do exactly as she wants and to try and get the glamorous life that she thinks she deserves.
Deborah is all the worst traits of Calypso from the Camomile Lawn and Louise and Zoe from the Cazalet Chronicles and it makes her adventures compulsively readable.
Deborah, our protagonist, is dreadful. She's a terrible, terrible person but you just can't stop reading about her. At the start of the book, she and her husband Graham are in bed together ahead of his departure to Cairo to do war work. On the very first page Graham says he can't promise to be physically faithful, but promises not to fall in love and not to sleep with anyone who might fill her place in his life. He asks her to promise the same. But Deborah doesn't take him up on this offer - instead she swears that she will be faithful to him and to not act on any attraction she feels to another man. Deborah does not keep her promise...
In fact Deborah is a mistress of self-justification and can pretty much turn any situation around so that in her head she can justify what it is that she wants to do as being right. Soon after Graham's departure she's bored in the countryside and decides that the best thing for her would be to move to London and get a war job, leaving behind her son with the housekeeper come nanny - because this would make him happier because although he'll see less of her, he'll only see the best of his mother. Thus the tone of Deborah's self-delusion is set.
I think Deborah is pretty much impossible to like, but instead you're fascinated by her progress as she slowly abandons all her standards and rules and manages to rationalism absolutely anything if it means she can do exactly as she wants and to try and get the glamorous life that she thinks she deserves.
Deborah is all the worst traits of Calypso from the Camomile Lawn and Louise and Zoe from the Cazalet Chronicles and it makes her adventures compulsively readable.