A review by charleslambert
Across The Common by Elizabeth Berridge

3.0

I'm the last person to whine when books written decades or centuries ago fail to match up to current notions of political correctness (and this is not an attack on PC itself!), but I think I might have given this book four stars for its many undeniable qualities if it hadn't reminded me so shamelessly of just what an appallingly class-ridden society Britain was in the 1950-60s. I say shamelessly because Berridge, for all the fineness of her emotional and creative intelligence, all of which is amply on display in this novel, never imagines that the world beyond, or rather beneath, the one she describes - a world of dwindling private incomes, devoted staff and not taking one's hat off for tea - isn't simply barbarism howling at the door. If the novel had managed - just once - to mention the world of council houses and supermarkets without the finicky larding of adjectives like 'ugly' or 'horrible', or had showed the merest glimmer of novelistic insight when describing the son of the family's faithful retainer - a (shudder) supermarket assistant manager - rather than painting him in the crudest, broadest strokes possible, this would have been a richer, and far less dated novel. If I thought for a minute that the title contained a play in the word 'common', or that the image of someone using a telescope to observe, almost wistfully, the lives of the people across it, had a metaphorical resonance, I'd respect the book more. As it is, by playing to her own limitations and to the presumed limitations of her readership, Berridge - and the perception at the heart of her book - is sadly blinkered.