This latest novel by the author best known for Captain Morelli's Mandolin is a family saga, charting the lives of the McCoshes from 1900 until about 1925.
Hamilton McCosh is a Scottish businessman (canny) married to an English gentlewoman (snobbish). They live in a lovely villa somewhere in Kent and have four daughters: “blue-eyed Rosie, with her long rich chestnut hair”; Christabel, an English rose in the making, tall and athletic; Ottilie, who was clearly going to be of the traditional English pear shape, with a pale round face and lovely dark eyes beneath a sweet dark fringe; and, lastly, Sophie, little, thin and ungainly, with “uncontrollable frizzy hair”.
Louis de Bernières traces the fortunes of all up to a point, but Rosie is the most rounded character, and the main protagonist. Sophie – of the frizzy hair – is “quirky”, manifesting this in a tendency to coin words every time she opens her mouth. She says things like “My pulchritudinosityness knows no bounds” or “I’m horripilated”.
In a novel firmly grounded in all the cliches of fiction and history, Christabel, the tall athletic one with the name of a suffragette, has an affair with a cartoonish lesbian, Gaskell – a brilliant artist who dresses in tweed plus-fours and is seldom without a long cigarette holder in her mouth, or a monocle on her startlingly green eye. Ottilie has no particular character and tends to fade into the wallpaper, as if the writer forgets about her and pulls her back in from time to time, not sure exactly who she is, except – well, pear shaped.
The household is completed by a chirpy little maid, Millicent, and wise old cook, Cookie.
Next door live the Pendenisses, an American family, with a son, Ashbridge, and on the other side the Pitts, whose son is called Daniel. Both brave, strong, handsome young men fall in love with Rosie, but Rosie chooses Ashbridge. When the war starts, being brave and noble, he rushes to enlist, with the usual outcome.
The strength of the novel is in its anti-war theme. This is not exactly original – what novelist has ever been pro the first World War? And no later works can ever compete with those written by the writers who lived through it, such as the unsurpassed All Quiet on the Western Front.
But de Bernières is good on violence, and he succeeds in reinvigorating the horrible experience. The familiar rats, lice, mud, smells and shells are augmented by a few fresh horrors. The “Huns”, for instance, used dead bodies to build parapets, according to de Bernières. That was news to me. He does not hold back in describing the terrifyingly painful nature of wounds and the agonies of deaths euphemistically covered by “died instantly” or “missing in action” in official dispatches.
Nasty surprise
One of the characters, Daniel, is in the RAF, and the accounts of the war in the air are especially effective. De Bernières knows his aircraft. He can also deliver a nasty surprise with a magician’s sleight of hand:
Myrtle thought the bombers looked beautiful as they circled above her. The sun was sparkling off their white wings, and everyone in the potato queue was craning their neck upwards and pointing . . . Myrtle watched a single bomb fall from one of the Gothas, the tiny black speck growing ever larger. She clutched her bag to her chest and held her breath as she and forty-four others were annihilated instantly, and seventeen more began their agonising and indecent journey into death.
There are several other examples of passages such as this, using understatement to excellent effect, and springing a shock at the close of a lyrical run.
Verge on parody
Unfortunately, there are many more that are tired, predictable and often so unlikely, given that the book is written in the mode of realism, as to verge on parody. Indeed, the poetic or childish titles given to each of the 106 chapters encourage a suspicion that at some level the author is indeed engaging in parody. Chapters, with titles such as “A Kindness” , “The Rescue”, or “Christabel and Gaskell at The Tarn”, are told in various voices and from various points of view, but apart from some consisting of extremely long letters or scraps of diary, most of them are delivered largely in dialogue. Rather stilted dialogue, for the most part.
“I will not have one of my daughters becoming a mere nurse. Ladies of our station do not enter such a profession, any more than they dance the tango. They do not, indeed, enter any profession. Nurses have been at the forefront of the suffragists. They are a most reprehensible of women.”
Thus Mrs McCosh, always arch and ridiculous. The exaggeratedly stiff style and silly snobberies of her lines would be entertaining if delivered on the screen by some celebrated doyen of British theatre, but on the page they are not clever or witty enough to amuse.
This a lightweight work, with no depths, hidden or otherwise. If it had been written by a woman and published by a small Irish publisher it would have been quickly categorised as chick lit.
According to a quote on the back of the book from the Evening Standard, however, de Bernières is "in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh". The only thing this novel has in common with Dickens's work is that it is long. And Brideshead Revisited, arguably the worst novel by the great master or irony, wit and English prose, has probably given de Bernières a few ideas. But the more likely forebears of this work are Enid Blyton, Georgette Heyer and, particularly, the television drama Downton Abbey, of which I was constantly reminded as I read Mrs McCosh's arch lines. I prefer Downton Abbey. Chocolate-box historical fiction comes across better on television.
So. Not Charles Dickens or Evelyn Waugh. But a very undemanding volume for the plane or the beach. And who knows, we may well be watching the antics of the well-dressed McCosh family with great delight on dark winter Sunday evenings in a year or two. It will go well with mince pies and a glass of mulled wine.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne teaches creative writing at University College Dublin
