The Captive Reader

Oh, my goodness.  I thought Thirkell had been playing around with too many characters in Love Among the Ruins but I knew nothing.  Nothing, I tell you!  Honestly, I think that after the war she must have made a bet with someone about how many romantic pairings she could accomplish in a single volume, since she seems to be trying to best herself with each subsequent book.  From 1949, The Old Bank House by Angela Thirkell offers a surprising lack of memorable quotes but it makes up for that with a flurry of engagements.

The Old Bank House is the home purchased by wealthy and gregarious industrialist Sam Adams, the refurbishment of which provides the neighbourhood with some good entertainment and gossip over the course of the novel.  Only a few years before, Sam Adams was a rank outsider but now he is at the very heart of Barsetshire society, accepted by all the best county families – though that’s not to say they are entirely comfortable with him.  A long-time widower, Sam might not have taken Miss Sowerby’s warning that the house likes a mistress very seriously when he bought it from her but by the end of the novel even he is among the ranks of the newly engaged.

For me, one of the delights of The Old Bank House is the full introduction to Mr Adams’ new neighbours, the Grantlys (descendents of Trollope’s Grantlys).  Eleanor Grantly, the eldest daughter of the family, was glimpsed briefly in Love Among the Ruins working with Susan Dean at the Red Cross Depot Library, but without giving any real idea of her character.  There are four Grantly children but it is only the eldest two who matter here: Eleanor and Tom, who is miserably failing Classics at Oxford and is struggling to decide what to do with his life since most of his twenties were spent in the army.  Eleanor is rather bland but she turns out to be the woman perpetual bachelor Colin Keith has been waiting for, though he takes a while to admit that despite some rather suggestive romantic flights of fancy that you would think he’d be intelligent enough to interpret:

…she was quite different from anyone else and he was the only person who really understood how perfect she was.  Not that he was in love.  Oh no, not at all.  But he felt a strong desire to shelter her from he didn’t quite know what, to rescue her from the Red Cross, where she was happily doing very good work, to have very long talks with her in comfortable rooms with soft lights and leaping fires, or in summer lanes under green trees with birds singing, all by himself.

Tom, though he gets more attention in the next book, is special because he is the first character Thirkell really uses to explore the struggles of young men readjusting to civilian life after years spent in the military.  She had hinted at shadows in other male characters – Charles Belton especially – but it is Tom who is used to illustrate how at sea these men are who spent their early twenties fighting, missing out on the years they would have otherwise spent in school, learning and contemplating their future careers.  In his late twenties, Tom feels foolish at the university, surrounded by students almost a decade younger than himself.  He can’t reconcile his idea of where a man should be by his time in life with his own situation.  He feels he should be established by this age but instead he feels pathetically dependent on his parents.  The parent-child relationship in the Grantly family is one of my favourites.  They are a close, affectionate group but his parents don’t know how to handle Tom.  They want so desperately to help him and are willing to do all they can for him but they just cannot figure out how to communicate with him, this son who is so much more reserved than the boy they knew before the war.

This book also marks the last we see of Lady Emily Leslie, who passes away one afternoon, happy at the prospect of being reunited with her long-dead son, her husband, her dear papa…all her loved ones who have been so often in her rather confused thoughts these last few years.  Thirkell does a marvellous job handling the awkwardness, fear, and pain Lady Emily’s frequent bouts of confusion caused the family in her final months.  Their guilt over not knowing how to deal with her, their shame at feeling so heartbroken over her frail state when they feel they should be strong for her…it is all very well done, as is the range of reactions to her death.  The older members of the family, who remember their mama and grandmother as she used to be, view it as a relief for her but the younger grandchildren, especially Clarissa who thought of Lady Emily as her closest friend, have a much more difficult time.

Clarissa, with all her airs and graces, is undoubtedly my favourite post-war young person.  In fact, I almost like her more than my beloved Lydia, something I never thought I would say.  Clarissa is fascinating.  She is beautiful and elegant, coolly composed, affectionately attached to her unseen father, pleasantly domestic (she is frequently found mending her brothers’ ripped clothes), and intelligent and ambitious enough to be pursuing her studies at university, where she is taking a mathematical scholarship with an eye to engineering.  She is also, for her age, unusually observant of other people.  But she is not mature enough yet to have the unaffected adult manners to match her brains, leading to some awkward and embarrassing moments.  Thankfully, Charles Belton is generally there to knock her down to size when her more imperious moods strike her.  The evolving relationship between those two is very interesting, mostly for what it reveals about Clarissa’s character, and very drawn out (it spans five novels).  As with all things Clarissa-related, I only wish Thirkell had given it more attention instead of pushing them always into the background.

I struggle to evaluate my reactions to some of these post-war novels, particularly the string of Love Among the Ruins, The Old Bank House, The Duke’s Daughter and County Chronicle, which were published one after the other from 1948 to 1951.  On the one hand, I love getting to encounter so many favourite old characters and I greet the introduction of new ones with enthusiasm.  Nothing makes me happier than a fresh engagement and Thirkell certainly supplies enough of those.  But I miss the stronger narratives of her other books, particularly the pre-war ones, where stories centered around a somewhat limited cast.  Even though Thirkell’s skill is as keen as ever in these books, her commentary on the issues of the day far sharper than anything in her earlier novels, they are weaker on the whole.  They lack focus and the episodic nature of the stories can make them frustrating to read, as you bounce from one set of characters to another then another then another…  I love these books – and what’s more I think they are important and should be read more widely because of how well Thirkell articulates the struggles faced by both civilians and demobbed soldiers in the years after the war – but I think she would have benefited from a stricter editor who could have refined the focus of the books and limited her central cast to a modest two or three dozen.