The Captive Reader

When I read Family Roundabout by Richmal Crompton back at the beginning of February, I didn’t so much read as devour it.  Persephone seems to have a genius for publishing ‘unputdownable’ books and, as with The Home-Maker, Little Boy Lost, Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary, and The Shuttle, once I picked this up there was no way I was going to put it down until I had read the final page.  This was my first encounter with Crompton and my goodness but could she write an absorbing story.

Family Roundabout revolves around the Fowler and Willoughby families.  Both families are headed by a widowed matriarch, each the mother of five children, each with a very different approach to parenting.  Mrs Willoughby dispenses orders like a general, while Mrs Fowler generally allows her offspring to fumble along with very little interference from her.  Over the course of almost twenty years, from 1920 to 1939, the novel tracks the fates of these women and their children as they struggle with relationships, both romantic and familial.

Mrs Willoughby is my hero.  That is perhaps not what Crompton intended the reader to think but I adored her from the first page and hope desperately to be her when I grow up and have relations to boss about.  She is magnificently confident and has total authority over all her children (much to her sons-in-law’s despair).  There is no problem too small for her notice and she always knows what must be done.  And when Mrs Willoughby tells you what must be done, you do it.  It’s marvellously efficient to have a family so well-trained at taking instructions, though this universal obedience was perhaps the first sign that there were going to be moments and characters that didn’t ring true to life.  For Mrs Willoughby, family is paramount and all-encompassing: cousins, aunts, and all sorts of distant and aged relatives fall under her care.  She is bossy, yes, but also loving and generous: she becomes involved in other people’s lives because she wants to make them better.  When she acquires a daughter-in-law just as forceful as she, she views her not as a rival but as an apprentice to be tutored.  She is overwhelming and probably terrifying if it is your life she’s trying to organize but I adored her.

On the other extreme, there is Mrs Fowler, who is remarkably passive.  Years before, she fell in love with a man who liked weak, silly women so, to win him, presented herself as one.  She has separated herself into two personas: ‘Milly’ is the soft, yielding character her family knows so well, whereas ‘Millicent’ is the one with all the sharp comebacks, who comes out when Milly forgets to silence her.  Now, even after her husband’s death, Mrs Fowler keeps up her Milly-ish appearance so as not to confuse her now adult children who only know her as a dear, foolish lady.  She is generally content with her languid life, passing pleasant afternoons reading in the garden or engaged in other similarly strenuous activities.  Mrs Willoughby’s active interference is utterly foreign to Mrs Fowler, but where Mrs Willoughby drives the actions of her family members, Mrs Fowler’s are driven by her children and their expectations of her.  She dare not travel or let them glimpse her true intelligence, not when they might need her to be there for them to be the simple, sweet mother they know.  She loves her children and is deeply loved in return but knows her limits when it comes to parenting them.  She is always there to support them but would never think of trying to guide them in the manner of Mrs Willoughby.

As the novel begins, these two women and their families are awkwardly united by the marriage of Helen Fowler to Max Willoughby.  Helen was my favourite character from the moment she was introduced as a blunt, managing, unemotional young woman, practical and forthright but unaware of her own heart and of how much she really does love Max.  She was the character I followed with the most interest over the years, as she became fully assimilated into the Willoughby family and was taken up by Mrs Willoughby as her natural deputy (unlike Mrs Willoughby’s own, easily cowed daughters).  Whereas some of the dramatic situations experienced by other characters felt a tad contrived, the minor crisis Helen experiences later in life felt like a very logical consequence of her behaviour.

The novel was going along very nicely until suddenly an extraordinary amount of trouble is experienced almost entirely at once by almost everyone, as through Crompton had decided her characters were all far too happy and that it was now time to upset all their lives on very little pretence.  Okay then.  Max and Helen get off easily, as do his two sisters, but everyone else is tortured to some extent by bad marriages, desperate loves, or…I’m not really sure how to describe what happens to Oliver Willoughby, actually.  That had to have been the most bizarre twist, as he descends from passionate lover to fussy, neurotic bachelor in a breathtakingly short amount of time.  Even allowing for the contrived circumstances under which some of these characters found themselves in these frankly bleak situations, Crompton seems to offer very little hope to some of them for a more cheerful future.

As much as I loved Crompton’s writing style and her excellent sense of humour, in the end I was left pleasantly diverted but not wildly impressed.  The writing is utterly absorbing, the characters are wonderfully realised, and I do think she brings up some fascinating if disturbing points through her characters’ emotional struggles, but for me this was a manufactured drama which admirably served its purpose as entertainment but doesn’t leave you with anything more.  I enjoyed it and will happily reread it but it did not win me over in the way it has so many other readers.  I do know that I will certainly be looking out for more of Crompton’s adult novels (like Frost at Morning).