Cotters' England [Paperback]

Christina Stead (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Angus & Robertson (1974)
• ASIN: B000OOZW2S
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars It was grim in post-war England., March 7, 2001

By 

darragh o'donoghue - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cotters' England (A & R classics)

Attracted to this book by raves from Patrick White and my favourite writer, Angela Carter, I was eagerly expecting some unholy mix of reckless epic and verbal fusillade. What I got was a stubbornly inedible stew of Arnold Bennett and DH Lawrence; the flat social realism of the former, detailing post-war working class/socialist/bohemian england; and the incoherent mysticism of the latter, expressed in the dense, interminable monologues with which the heroine tries to literally bore her acolytes to death.

The novel simply refuses to live - the situations don't make much sense, the characters are phoney, and the words are spewed out too easily to seem anything but insincere. A figurative undertow of the novel, nagging away at the 'realism', comes from the world of folk and fairy tales, horror and the supernatural, especially in the last third, with brief hallucinatory interruptions; but each time the otherwordly threatens, the unreal everyday comes crashing in like the heroine's ceiling.