Second paragraph of third chapter:
It was being a thoroughly grown-up evening, and she [Clary] didn’t want him [Archie}to think that she didn’t know about conversation – particularly as Polly wasn’t helping at all: she simply smiles and chose things to eat and ate them. She looked awfully pretty in a pale yellow dress with a lace collar and a little black taffeta bow with streamers.
Third in Elizabeth Jane Howard’s brilliant family saga of the Cazalets, set during the Second World War, with the young and middle-aged women who are the central characters falling in love and having plenty of (off-stage) sex, not always with the right people or the same people. I almost feel that we had 900 pages of set-up in the first two volumes, which then explodes into lots and lots of plot here, which is maybe a little unfair as the first two were hardly without incident. Howard’s own gruesome first marriage (to Peter Scott) is unsparingly mined for material, with two particularly memorable passages involving very small babies.
Along with the turbulent love lives of the various viewpoint figures, there are some gems of observation about women’s roles in the society of 1940s England, and a quietly devastating subplot about the Holocaust and the uncovering of the concentration camps. Howard is tremendous at showing a society on the verge of tremendous change – mostly of course from the viewpoint of the privileged, but you write about what you know. And again there is an unlooked-for twist at the end which has my appetite whetted for the fourth volume.
This is not a fast-paced series, but I’m hugely enjoying it. You can get Confusion here.
Easy Bechdel pass – in the first chapter Polly and Clary talk about the afterlife and Polly’s dead mother.
I also listened to the middle part of the excellent BBC radio adaptation, which went out as a series of fifteen-minute episodes in 2013 (ten for each of the five books). The BBC moved around some of the internal narrative – the lesbian subplot is much earlier, and the twist at the end signalled much more in advance – but it’s faithful to the spirit of the original. Everyone is good but I was particularly impressed with Alix Wilton Regan, playing Louise, the character closest to Elizabeth Jane Howard herself. You can get it here.
