The Captive Reader

Several years ago, Love Among the Ruins by Angela Thirkell was the very first Thirkell novel I picked up.  I had never heard of her before and had no idea how vast her Barsetshire series was, but the blurb on the back of the library’s Moyer Bell edition made it sound like a delightful romantic comedy and just the kind of book I would adore.  So I took it home and immediately started reading.

Now, I love this book but that first time I had absolutely no idea what was going on.  I slogged through the first hundred pages or so, delighted by Thirkell’s style and particularly thrilled by her comments on parent-child relationships and witty criticisms of the Labour government, but I became so lost in the massive cast of unknowns that I had to give up.  Tebbenses, Deans, Beltons, Keiths, Marlings and Winters abounded and I liked them all but had no idea what was going on.  I had come too late to the party and the hostess was too busy to give more than the briefest introductions.  It wasn’t early 2011, during my first enthusiastic assault on Thirkell’s Barsetshire series, that I was able to read this in full, loving it.  Now, rereading it after having read all but one of the 16 books that precede it, I enjoyed it even more.

Our story begins when Charles Belton (who made his first appearance in The Headmistress) is hired on as a junior master at Philip Winter’s Priory School.  This serves mostly as a means of crashing together all sorts of young people from Thirkell’s earlier books, who might otherwise have remained isolated in separate corners of Barsetshire, and making as many romantic matches as possible.  Thirkell has gathered together Lucy and Oliver Marling, Charles and Freddy Belton, Susan and Jessica Dean, Colin Keith…every unmarried youngish person of note shows up, mostly (in the case of the men) to flirt with Jessica Dean.  Even the too, too precocious Clarissa Graham gets to try her hand at flirting with Captain Freddy Belton, though he is thirty-five to her eighteen.

You know who doesn’t show up?  Tony Morland.  I wonder if I will ever get over my disappointment that Thirkell conducted Tony’s domestic affairs entirely off-stage, as it were.  As though I could care about anyone’s affairs more than his, after following his progress from demon to half-way-presentable youth with such devotion!  No, Tony is safely married off, living abroad, and beginning to sire a hopeful young family.  I feel so cheated.  We don’t even get to glimpse Tony and Mrs Tony; we just hear of them through his mother.  Still, I suppose we must trust Mrs Morland’s judgement of Tony’s choice:

‘Do you like your daughter-in-law?’ said Mrs Belton, whose maternal mind had often been exercised as to whether she would like her sons’ wives when they got married.

‘Like,’ said Mrs Morland, pushing a wisp of hair behind one ear, ‘is not exactly the word,’ which made Mrs Belton wonder if Mrs Tony was cross-eyed or cross-tempered as she sometimes feared, on no grounds at all, that Mrs Freddy or Mrs Charles might be.  ‘I don’t want to boast, but I sometimes think I am fonder of her than of Tony, which,’ said Mrs Morland with the air of one who has been brought up with Euclid from the cradle, ‘is of course impossible.  And as for the baby, it is the most angelic tomfool in the world.’

An absurd number of characters wander though this book in an equally absurd number of settings.  It is one of the least cohesive Barsetshire books, which is saying something, but each episode is so delightful and so memorable that it didn’t really matter to me.  There are scads of dinner parties, a enjoyable school Parents’ Day (where Jessica Dean and Aubrey Clover make a most impressive appearance), a Leslie family gathering at Rushwater that had me tearing up, and a combined Conservative Rally and Pig Show that is a runaway success, easily the most entertaining political, agricultural and dare we say social gathering ever held in Barsetshire.

The prime romantic entanglement is between Freddy Belton and Susan Dean.  Susan, the Red Cross Depot Librarian, had a sizable role in Private Enterprise, where she was constantly in the shadow of Peggy Arbuthnot.  In her late twenties, Susan has the usual Dean combination of intelligence and beauty and is so approved of locally that she, despite her family’s lack of Barsetshire roots, has almost attained county-status for herself on the strength of her work in the community.  There were no men in her life during the war – the Red Cross being a largely female domain – and what men have entered since seem to admire her in a decidedly asexual way.  But the reader knows how Thirkell hates a spinster and is confident that a marriage is in the works.  Freddy is…adequate.  I like Freddy in general, quite a lot in The Headmistress, but he is very dull here, probably because Thirkell is juggling so many plots and characters that we only get to see him briefly.  It is a perfect match though and usefully brings some of the Dean wealth into the cash-strapped Belton family.

The most satisfying pairing is between Richard Tebben, that odious young man from August Folly, and Petra Krogsborg, a terrifying Nordic goddess who will bully him into being a better man.  If ever a man deserved a wife who would bully him, it is Richard.  It was Thirkell’s perfect expression of Richard’s thoughtless ingratitude towards his parents that delighted me so much when I first picked up the book, even though I could not follow anything else that was going on:

All through his rather ungracious life he had despised his parents, though they might with equal rights have despised him for wasting his time and their hard-earned money at Oxford and taking a poor third.  But parents are incorrigible forgivers and also moral cowards, so no one had ever told Richard how badly he had behaved and he had continued to despise them.

This is the first book where Clarissa Graham begins to assert herself as a character worthy of our attention.  She appeared in Peace Breaks Out but she was really there only to unsettle her uncle David Leslie and help him to finally grow up.  Here, we get to know her as a person.  At eighteen, she is lovely, intelligent and too, too (as her irritating catch phase would have it) precocious for her own good.  Clarissa features in a string of these post-war books and she is one of Thirkell’s more beguiling female characters because she is so reserved.  Thirkell lets us glimpse what others say of her –the good and the bad – but we rarely get insights into her own thoughts and she has no close friends to share her feelings with.  Here she is still relatively carefree, the romance with Charles Belton that will cause her such heartache in the coming years is only just starting, but it is interesting to read Thirkell’s description of her character.  The physical attributes and mannerisms Clarissa shares with her enchanting mother and grandmother are often mentioned but later books rarely point out the steel and ambition she inherited from her male relatives:

To those who did not know her well her extreme elegance, her poise, her good looks, gave the impression that she would be what is mistakenly called a society butterfly.  But there is alas little enough sun for the sadly few butterflies now.  There must have been in Clarissa something of her father’s ambition and steadiness of purpose, something of her Leslie grandfather’s business instinct, transmuted in her from prize bulls to engineering draughtsmanship; something too of her great-uncle, old Lord Pomfret’s ruthless egoism.  She had charming manners by nature and training, but if really annoyed she could on occasion use a small sharp dagger with great accuracy, as her uncle, David Leslie, had found to his cost when he tried to patronize her.

Clarissa is not always portrayed sympathetically in the series but she is one of my favourite characters.

Even as their elders are worried about marrying them off, the “younger” generation – here being exemplified by Oliver Marling and Freddy Belton, both in their mid- to late- thirties – is beginning to worry about their aging parents.  Mrs Marling and Mrs Belton may still refer to their adult sons as children (in their minds you become an adult when you marry) but the burden of care is starting to shift from one generation to the next.  The men, having made it through the war, now have to face the prospect that they shall probably outlive their parents after all and be faced with the upsetting circumstance of one parent predeceasing the other:

…Oliver could see her pleasure over his father’s admiration, and he thought of his talk with Freddy Belton about ‘What to do with our parents’ and felt that if heaven would kindly arrange for both his parents to die in their sleep, though not for a long time, simultaneously, it would be a kind deed and worth heaven’s consideration.  But he had noticed that heaven appeared to be more and more occupied with its own affairs, perhaps had given up trying to help when this Government had so obviously got the upper hand and told himself that wishful thinking did nobody any good.

This is not the best book in the series and it certainly not a good book for a beginner (even my first full reading of it last year was confusing because I had only encountered half the characters beforehand) but I still love it.  I always love any appearance by Charles Belton, I adore when attention is lavished on Clarissa, and I was so satisfied to see Susan matched up with one of the few men worthy of her.  I do wish more time and attention had been given to Susan and Freddy’s romance but, since the trade-off was for numerous delightful encounters with equally well-loved characters and some biting satire on the much-hated Labour government, I suppose I can live without that.  And the combined Conservative Rally and Pig Show remains one of the most brilliant ideas I’ve ever come across.