After years of looking for a copy of Rhododendron Pie by Margery Sharp (and not being able to stomach the $300+ price tag attached to used copies), I finally employed my interlibrary loan system to help me track it down. For the eminently reasonable price of $15 dollars they found it for me in the wilds of Utah and now, after almost ten years of waiting, I have finally had a chance to read it.
First published in 1930, Rhododendron Pie is the story of the Laventie family. The country-dwelling Laventies take great pleasure in their cultured and sophisticated tastes when compared to their pitiful rural neighbours and this is, we learn on the first page, a tradition that the family has carried on for many generations:
…deep-rooted in Sussex history, they had nevertheless a fantastic strain in their blood which served to alienate them almost entirely from their worthy neighbours. Generation after generation of eldest sons set off on the Grand Tour and had to be sought out, years after, in Paris and Vienna and St Petersburg when the death of their sires left Whitenights masterless. They came home middle-aged men, urbane, travelled, generally impoverished, occasionally debauched: and the good Sussex squires asked them to dine. It was usually about six months before all invitation ceased.
In the current era, this family trait is exhibited by Mr Laventie, a louche aesthete who goes travelling (and philandering) every so often and returns with a gift for his invalid wife and even more distain for his rural neighbours, eldest daughter Elizabeth, a sharp-tongued and observant essayist, and son Dick, an artist. Mrs Laventie, disabled for many years, stays quietly in the background for the most part while daughter Ann struggles to find where she fits in. Not unnaturally, she shares the tastes and prejudices of her opinionated family members, as we all absorb the world view of those we grew up with. But even early in life there are signs that a more conventional soul lurks beneath: it is Ann, alone among the Laventie children, who quietly loathes the family birthday tradition of pies filled with artistic but inedible flowers. Rather than beautiful mounds of rhododendron flowers, Ann longs for juicy apples to fill her birthday pie.
Ann is our heroine but, as in the way of so many Margery Sharp novels, heroine may be too strong a word. It implies perhaps more fondness than Sharp cares to elicit from us. What I love about many of Sharp’s other novels is how pointed they are and how callously she treats many of her protagonists. Here in her first novel she hasn’t quite achieved that style but the early glimmerings are there. She gives us enough in Ann to care about but not so much that we don’t still find her frustrating in her moments of meekness and uncertainty.
And there are many such moments. Ann, young and isolated from the glamorous world of artists and liberal thinkers that she has been brought up to view as her rightful sphere, is infatuated when Gilbert Croy arrives at Whitenights. A daring film producer, Croy is handsome and flatteringly attentive to Ann. It is only when the action moves to London that Ann, who has decided she is in love with Croy and willing to marry him, realises how little her values align with those of her father, her siblings and Croy. For in the country the family’s affectations were relatively harmless – at least to themselves. They may have made cutting remarks about the stolid neighbours (particularly the sprawling Gaylord family) and discussed their beliefs in personal expression and free love but in Sussex the neighbours found them too odd (and perhaps too amusing) to take much offense and there was little chance of a belief in free love causing problems when there was no one intellectual enough around to love. London, where all three children find themselves, is another matter.
Following Elizabeth and Dick to town, Ann finds herself part of their social circles and not at all sure of her surroundings. Everyone she meets seems somewhat lost in their pursuit of individual pleasures and free love seems to be causing more pain than anything.
When she retreats home to Sussex, Ann’s London experiences help her see her old surroundings and old country friends in a new way. And when she falls in love with one of those neighbours whom her family so despise – a young man who is so gauche as to work in a bank, epitomizing the type of conventional thinking that so outrages Mr Laventie – the family is aghast.
It’s an entertaining story but, for me, a forgettable one. Sharp was very young when she wrote it – only twenty four or twenty five – and everything is a bit simplistic. The elements that would make her excellent later are there but it’s a bit of wasted potential when she wasn’t yet confident enough to truly make fun of her eminently laughable creations.
What it worth $15? Absolutely. Is it worth $300? Certainly not. Spend your money instead on one of her later, better works (my favourites are The Flowering Thorn and Something Light). But if you can track this down, there is still plenty to enjoy.
10. 
7. 
4. The Fear and the Freedom (2017) – Keith Lowe 
1. 
Literary Lapses by Stephen Leacock (1910) – Leacock is so dependably funny and never more so than in this polished collection of sketches. They were all so good it was impossible to pick a favourite, though I might lean towards the first two stories: “My Financial Career”, about feeling uncomfortable in banks, and “Lord Oxhead’s Secret”, a melodramatic spoof about a bankrupt earl. Simon liked it so much 
Mackerel Sky by Helen Ashton (1930) – Definitely one to skip. This badly done portrait of a very bad marriage between two equally self-absorbed young people was a chore to get through and worth reading only for the insights it gives into women’s working lives (hours, pay, etc) during the 1920s. Wife Elizabeth spends her days working hard in a dress shop so her husband Gilbert can focus on his writing and so she can feel martyr-like. As her doctor points out:
Four Gardens by Margery Sharp (1935) – After a wonderful encounter with Sharp earlier this year (when I read 
Pistols for Two by Georgette Heyer (1960) – a mildly enjoyable but extraordinarily repetitive collection of short stories from Heyer, featuring far too many people wanting to run off to Gretna Green (it’s mentioned 25 times in less than 200 pages). It is also sadly short on Heyer’s trademark humour – and Heyer without humour is frankly pointless. The title story, about two life-long best friends preparing to duel each other over a pointless jealousy, was my favourite in the collection while the rest have quickly faded from memory. There was a surplus of nineteen-year old heroines with big eyes and bouncing curls so the few exceptions – a debutante’s mother oblivious to her own suitor and a thirty-something spinster chasing after a runaway niece (bound for Gretna, naturally) in the company of her one-time fiancé – stand out. I’ll keep 
Something Wholesale by Eric Newby (1962) – after returning from a German POW camp at the end of WWII, Eric Newby was at loose ends when his parents decided he should join the family wholesale clothing business:
Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser (1969) – Such joy! Such fun! Such political incorrectness! I knew from the very first lines that I was going to enjoy this:
Judgement Day by Penelope Lively (1980) – A difficult book to review. On the one hand, 
I have a new book on my list of favourites and, much to my surprise, it’s by an author whose writing I had previously described as “
The Captive Reader 