(Esther) Freud, Forster, Pym and Drabble

There's something about the English in Italy that novelists seem to find irresistible. It's easy to see why- the heat, and the beauty of the surroundings give way to all sorts of emotional explosions and self discovery. The heroine of Love Falls by Esther Freud is seventeen year old Lara, who is taken to Italy by her academic father whom she only slightly knows during the time of Charles and Diana's wedding (did people ever really think that that was a love match?), where they get involved with his old friend Andrew Willoughby, his mistress and his gang of spoiled brats. There's certainly an echo of Brideshead Revisited in the depiction of the exiled aristocrat with a Catholic wife who refuses to divorce him, but none of these characters have any of the charm or magnetism of Waugh's clan. The unpleasantness of the Willoughbys would make even Anthony Blanche blush. I found Lara a frustrating character in that she never really responds to anything and doesn't ask any questions about the tangled intrigues she finds herself caught up in. I have to say that although Esther Freud's prose is of course superior to Stephenie Meyer's, I didn't feel as if it was a million miles away from Bella Swann and Edward Cullen (gawky girl who doesn't realise she's beautiful swooning over impossibly beautiful boy). It makes me realise that character really is the thing I value most in a novel, more so than plot (as A Glass Full of Blessings shows)- if I don't care for any of them, there isn't really much point in continuing. Nice cover art, though.     
                                                                                            

Where Angels Fear To Tread definitely isn't my favourite novel by E.M. Forster (I wasn't deliberately going for an English in Italy theme, it just happened). The story of impetuous young widow Lilia who goes to Italy, marries an Italian (younger than her) to the disapproval of her snobbish in-laws before dying in childbirth certainly exposes English superiority and hypocrisy at its worse, but I found it all rather flat overall. I was helping with an audition earlier this week (handing out scripts) and one of the auditionees came in reading this- I mentioned that I felt Forster did the English in Italy better in A Room With A View...                                                  

I picked up A Glass of Blessings in honour of the new Barbara Pym group on LibraryThing, which was most entertaining and delightful. One doesn't read Barbara Pym for her plots as there isn't really one to speak of. This is the third Pym novel I've read, and it's unusual in the sense that its heroine, Wilmet (what a name), is a fairly young, financially comfortable married woman with rather too much time on her hands and not much to do. Pym has such a flair for creating quietly quirky characters and I particularly enjoyed Wilmet's go-getting mother-in-law Sibyl (strangely the character I most identified with) and kleptomaniac clergy housekeeper Mr Basin. I have to admit that I never expected to find a gay couple in a Pym novel, but it's handled in a very understated, matter-of-fact way, and it forces Wilmet to reassess her assumptions about love and relationships. My favourite bit was in the blood donation clinic, which shows just how little has changed (my brother is a donor and has had some not so pleasant experiences due to horrible organisation and evil nurses- that scares me far more than the prospect of a needle), and reminded me of an episode of the Provincial Lady that E.M. Delafield never wrote. Come to think of it, I'm not sure if I've ever read a scene in a novel in a blood donation clinic. Quite surprising really, as such a place is rife for drama. I also love all the cross-references to characters in other Pym novels, it's like an extended network where everyone knows everyone else.

I'm not quite sure how to talk about The Red Queen by Margaret Drabble. This is going to sound really strange and it's not something I've ever suggested before, but I recommend reading the first narrative (the Crown Princess of Korea's story) and skipping the rest. The Crown Princess's story is frankly superb and absolutely riveting with one of the most fascinating and unique narrative voices I've ever come across. Her life, involving her marriage as a child to the mentally unstable Crown Prince  is so full of violence, intrigue and backstabbing and puts many a Jacobean tragedy in the shade (as the Crown Princess herself observes). It's quite complete in itself, which is an excellent thing as the second story is bit of a dead weight. The Crown Princess narrates her story from the afterlife, where she is able to observe her life and position from a global historical and cultural context. Normally I'd find such a device annoyingly contrived, but it works brilliantly. I think it's because the Crown Princess comes across as such a wise, introspective figure that it's completely believable that she'd be able to draw these parallels herself without the author putting the words in her mouth (though that's exactly what's happening, so I may just be talking nonsense...). There are also some deliciously wry comments. The second half of the story deals with Babs (awful name), who finds herself fascinated by the Crown Princess's story on her way to a conference in Korea and has an affair with a famous academic. That's about it. There are some tenuous parallels between her and the Crown Princess. She eventually meets Margaret Drabble at a party, who is so taken by the story that she decides to write a novel about it. That's when it all becomes too clever for its own good. I'm going to hear Margaret Drabble talk about this novel at the Korean Cultural Centre a week on Tuesday, should be interesting...