Another Persephone book. Not one of the best but it really did show that very little has changed within England in terms of what people have to give up. I drew the comparison between the second WW and climate change.
The Daily Mail called this 1944 novel 'an elegiac romance that describes social niceties, petty squabbles, self-restraint, all played out in a rural idyll, while abroad thousands die defending that very way of life.' The great interest of Jocelyn Playfair's book for modern readers is its complete authenticity. Set sixty years ago at the time of the fall of Tobruk in 1942, one of the low points of the war, and written only a year later when we still had no idea which way the war was going, A House in the Country has a verisimilitude denied to modern writers. Sebastian Faulks in Charlotte Gray or Ian McEwan in Atonement do their research and evoke a particular period, but ultimately are dependent on their own and historians' interpretation of events; whereas a novel like this one is an exact, unaffected portrayal of things as they were at the time. The TLS praised 'its evocation of the preoccupations of wartime England, and its mood of battered but sincere optimism'; and The Tablet remarked on its 'comic energy, compelling atmosphere and richly apt vocabulary.'
No comments:
Post a Comment