Customer Reviews

Cheerfulness Breaks in

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This novel by Angela Thirkell shows what happens when a huge nation lumbers into war, and deep inside its borders an insular county wakes up and starts smelling the coffee when a frightened government starts exporting its endangered school children from the nation's capital and forces them to live among their betters in Barsetshire. Thirkell devotes at least one chapter "The Christmas Treat" to the spectacle of charitable countrywomen trying to provide fun and gifts for a pack of ungrateful kids who don't respond in human terms but adopt the scary faces of the kids in VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED while overstuffing their greedy fat faces with ice cream, courgettes, Christmas crackers and other British treats. They are creepy as anything out of a Roald Dahl book.

The real pleasure in the book is watching big, butch Lydia Keith start falling for the sophisticated, Noel Coward-like Noel Merton, a man with more of the ways of a woman than she. Poor Lydia, a gross lump of a girl when in high school, now is more ladylike, and Noel finds himself attracted to her for her valiant courage in helping out her Mom and Dad, both ill and old, instead of going with her heart and taking up war work like her friends the infantile Geraldine Birkett and the stern Amazon Octavia Crawley. As the book progresses, you find yourself rooting for Noel and Lydia to get together. The other couples aren't very memorable, and you will get tired of the Bissells right away. What's worse, Angela Thirkell's never-ending hatred of foreigners like the Mixo Lydians, or her condescension toward members of the lower class who were cute? What's good about her books is the comedy in them, and the gentle romance that sometimes unites disparate county families. CHEERFULNESS BREAKS IN is one of her best.

For those who like this sort of thing, it's just the sort of thing they would like. I just happen to be one of those people! Thirkell is reactionary, pro-aristocracy, and writes about the tragedy of the gently fading county gentry in Britain, and how awful it is that they can't maintain their great houses and get servants anymore. I'm not with her politically, but she tells charming tales, mostly about young people falling in love and everybody surviving the War and post-War years. I read "High Rising" first, which is cackle aloud hilarious, assuming the rest would be. They're not, but they're very pleasant.