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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Marriage, a kind of pointless secular martyrdom.",
By
This review is from: Clothes in the Wardrobe (Paperback)
Alice Thomas Ellis is a constantly surprising author with seemingly unlimited talents, one who carefully tailors her style to her subject matter. Completely confident and controlled, she has no need to show off all her skills in every novel, and it is only by reading many of them that one notices her remarkable versatility and truly appreciates the magnitude of her individual talents. In this novel she subordinates her always sparkling dialogue to the main character's ironic interior monologues and a more thoughtful analysis of her themes, the relationship between love, death, and God. In the process she creates a sad and confused character with whom the reader develops enormous sympathy.
Margaret is a young woman planning her wedding to a much older, very boring man whom she does not love, "someone who meant to [her] as little as his mother's dog," believing that she "deserved nothing better." Very gradually, the author reveals Margaret's past in Egypt six months before, a time in which she fell in love irrevocably with someone she "loved more than [her] immortal soul." Now she is back in England, under the control of her mother, who had controlled her life "until about half a year ago, when I so briefly lived my own [life]and...destroyed it." Her mother's friend Lili, a free spirit married to an artist, becomes the first person who offers Margaret a more positive and pro-active view of life, if only she will accept the "truths" Lili has gleaned during her own chaotic life. Clothing imagery pervades the novel, with Lili believing, metaphorically, that "clothes are the person," while Margaret wonders if the elderly have minds like old wardrobes, "stuffed to overflowing with useless memories," which they can take out and look at and question. As clothing, both real and symbolic, is discussed in relation to the wedding, the associated memories come out of the "wardrobe" and reveal the characters' attitudes toward life, love, and even the grace of God. As Margaret's sojourn in Egypt is more fully revealed through her own memories, the reader becomes acutely aware of the contrasts between her naïve view of the world and that of her mother and her mother's friends, who while equally naïve in many respects, are also less thoughtful. Complex in its thematic development,the novel saves its climactic revelations for the conclusion. Finely crafted, exciting, and thoughtful in its depiction of love in all its manifestations, this is one of Ellis's more introspective and more serious novels. Mary Whipple
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