Customer Reviews

Falling

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I read this book eight years ago and still remember it vividly for both its story and the way it tells it. It circles in, in a meandering way, on what the truth really is. The reader is nearly as much in the dark as Daisy for most of the story, and what I have always remembered is how the reader finds out the truth much in the same way that Daisy does.

I checked in with Amazon to see if the book was now available in the US, having just recommended it to a friend. Happy to find it here, I was surprised to read the review of the 2007 reviewer who obviously neither shares my view, nor that of the 2006 reviewer, with whom I absolutely agree.

For a book to have stuck in my mind for as vividly and as long as this one has, it had to have something somewhat out of the ordinary. The one word that describes it best to me is 'haunting.'

Elizabeth Jane Howard's "Falling" depicts an impoverished, 65 year-old English gardener's, Henry Kent's courtship of a 61 year-old writer, Daisy Languish, in late 20th century, largely rural England. The book is coy about its genre. How will the book end? Is this a love story? Will it end in marriage? Is this a horror story? Will Henry murder Daisy for her money?

SPOILER ALERT: This review will reveal the ending of "Falling."

"Falling's" prose struck me as exceptional only for its dullness. The tone, pace, and vocabulary never varied, no matter what was happening - a scene of child abuse or a trip to a spring garden employed the same style. If characters had not been identified by the author, I would not have known, from their speech, who was speaking. The prose could almost have been generated by a computer program. The author never used a word I had to look up in the dictionary, or a phrase that delighted or offended me.

Too, the bulk of the book is not action or dialogue, but the inner musings of its characters. Henry thinks about his life; Daisy thinks about her life. Characters think about eating soup for lunch.

I kept reading, though, because Henry imagined himself married to Helen Burns, a beloved character from "Jane Eyre," a favorite book. Too, Daisy's first husband, Stash, was Polish, and that intrigued me.

About halfway through, I was so bored I decided to give up. But, at that point, I still had no idea what the author was trying to say, what genre the book was, or what I was supposed to be getting from it. Curious, I soldiered on, just to see what Elizabeth Jane Howard, a writer of some note, was up to.

Henry describes, in minute detail, his courtship of Daisy, as well as his childhood. Henry's father had been a stereotypical, working class brute, an unthinking, unfeeling, abusive, blue-collar worker. The scenes of abuse are, simply, boring. You just don't care about the little boy author Howard has written for you. That's because Howard is not interesting in understanding or illuminating child abuse. She has another - highly mechanical - agenda. More on that, below.

Daisy's entire life story is told vis-a-vis her sad relationships with men. Men who let her down. Men who cheated on her. Men who didn't satisfy her. Men who satisfied her just because they had pity on her. Has Daisy ever enjoyed anything in life, made anything happen? You won't learn from this book. All Daisy is is a passive victim of men.

Stash, Daisy's first husband, had been a Polish RAF pilot. He was a drunk and an adulterer. Oh, and he spoke the King's English with a Polish accent. Poor Daisy.

Finally, within pages of the end of the novel, and the reader's patient endurance, there is some action. Henry hits Daisy. At this point Daisy, passive and pathetic as ever - she's planning how to mend the relationship with Henry - Daisy's proper middle class British chums swoop in and rescue Daisy from Henry. They have investigated him, and reveal his true nature.

Henry Kent is a psychopath. He has a history of conning and abusing middle and upper class British ladies, none of whom, apparently, had any agency or gumption or could stop him.

This book wasn't a failure for me just because it was boring, although, in a novel, that is a cardinal sin. Penning a boring book about a psychopath should earn extra condemnation.

I'm so tired of British products - plays, books, movies - in which evil, working class, blue collar monsters pose diabolical threats to middle and upper class British bluebloods.

I'm tired of books and movies in which a psychopath's monstrous behavior is attributed to an abusive childhood. That's what those boring, lifeless scenes of child abuse were all about - Howard is trying to rationalize Henry's psychopathology. He became a psychological freak show because his blue-collar dad didn't show him enough love.

Don't we know enough about the British royal family to accept that a blue-collar is necessary and sufficient cause of emotional dysfunction?

Graphic, detailed bedroom scenes between elderly people are few and far between, especially scenes involving older women. Howard has given us a book in which graphic sex is a poisonous trap that a mature woman must be punished for enjoying. Hey, Elizabeth Jane Howard, thanks for that.

And her Daisy Languish (what a name!) has got to be the most unappealing female character I've read about in a long time. Daisy never shows any agency. She could have at least, at the end, picked up a vase and hurled it at Henry. That would have added some action to a plodding narrative, and caused some admiration for this masochistic professional victim. Alas, Howard denied Daisy even one brief moment of full humanity.

Finally, true crime productions have gone over the minds of psychopaths with fine-toothed combs. It would take a heck of an author to give us a fictional psychopath as complete as the real ones who bare all on true crime television shows and in the prose genre pioneered by "In Cold Blood."

This novel was my introduction to Howard's writing and I wasn't disappointed. The story was gripping and never trite. A must-read.