Book review: Remember when novels had short, unpretentious titles? Think Emma, Plumb, The Hobbit. Now names often sprawl across most of the cover, getting more cutesy with each passing word.
But never judge a book by its title, as Fran Lebowitz really meant to say. This chunky chronicle of post-World War I lives, by the author of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand (only four words), makes diverting, intermittently didactic yet dramatic-enough reading.
Constance, “pale as alabaster, and thin as a wet string”, meets aristocratic, scandalously trouser-wearing Poppy at the English seaside. Poppy’s a no-limits, no-bullshit young thing: she has established a women’s motorcycle group and wants to add flying lessons.
There’s your title and premise. There’s your primary narrative impetus as well. The two young women, plus a gutsy, social strata-crossing gaggle of others, want to enjoy as many emancipated experiences as possible. Alas, it ain’t that easy. The semi-immovable obstacles of sexism, classism and reverse ageism get in their way. The pushy young things “would be well advised to take up as a governess”, huffs one old trout.
So getting airborne isn’t plane sailing (sorry, sorry). Poppy’s impetuosity brings problems. So does the arrival of dashingly handsome Harris, with his wounded limb and matching heart.
It makes for plenty of social comedy and commentary, plus a number of jolts, which Simonson places competently throughout the narrative. A few of the jolts do seem a little wayward. A chap plunges to his death at a society ball? How … ill-mannered of him, everyone exclaims.
There’s room for a ripped fuselage, influenza deaths, disfigured soldiers in a Palladian home, childhood friendships swelling while hormones also swell, a bolshie housekeeper, multiple discussions of gender roles and the legacies of slavery, an alcoholic and tragic ex-sergeant, a lot of wardrobe itemising, and much more. And much more still. Surrender yourself and the profusion of events, plus the two eager young protagonists, will bear you along.
It’s a wordy book. Nimble words sometimes: elderly women in conversation “nodding their hats at each other”; birds “flinging themselves about in the trees”. Leaden words at other times: “… added a new string to the vibrations of anxiety that hummed in his veins”; “his duty to Evangeline is only made deeper”. Adjectives pile up; images shove in; almost everyone speaks in “good grammar”, standing still to deliver mini-lectures on sex and society.
It’s wide if not deep, spirited and undemanding and soppy in the right places. You have to love an ending (no, not a spoiler) where a decent chap arrives in a Sopwith Camel and blurts: “Constance … I’ve been such a fool!”
