Customer Reviews

A Few Green Leaves

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is another review comparing Barbara Pym's books so that readers can choose between them.

A FEW GREEN LEAVES is my favorite. After writing about London settings, Pym returns to the small country village of her beginnings. But, this village lacks the comfortable traditionalism of her earlier SOME TAME GAZELLE. Much of the book dwells on the changes that have come about in the English countryside by 1980.

A FEW GREEN LEAVES is not depressing, however. It is instead humorously realistic about the incongruities between what people have been raised to expect and what actually is. In this sense, it is the most profound of her books because it demonstrates how we can still get the most out of life when only "a few green leaves" remain. This book was written at the end of Pym's life and it contains wisdom and hopefulness as well as, of course, great humor.

"A Few Green Leaves" is one of Barbara Pym's best novels. It is full of characters familiar to readers of Pym's other novels; rectors, widows, spinsters, eccentrics, anthropologists and a cat lady. There is romance, but in true Pym fashion it is not always suitable. It is subtly funny and poignantly sad, often at the same time. The heroine, Emma Howick, is a prototypical Pym spinster, intellectual, unsure and perhaps uninterested in the classic ways to attract a man. She is an anthropologist recently moved to a small village to live in her mother's cottage. I discovered Barbara Pym's work while in college and nothing she has written has ever disappointed me.

This novel is so very British, reserved, yet profound. It beautifully celebrates the cerebral machinations of a small Oxfordshire village and portrays the intertwined lives of its aging as well as its younger residents. Symptomatic of changing times, the village has two doctors, a Dr. G who is older and traditional and comforting, unwilling to dispense medicine but more than able to send his patients away with a platitude or bromide; and a younger doctor, geriatrics specialist, far more modern, believing in the cure-all of exercise and perhaps a prescription. Besides the medical comforters is the traditional religious comforter, Reverend Tom, a widower living with his thwarted sister Daphe, who dreams of owning a dog and living on a sun-drenched island in Greece. Reverend Tom is a lovely, harmless man, unable to be bold or aggressive, dreaming of a lost medieval village somewhere in the woods around the town, and preoccupied with history while the present slips away from him. Then there is Emma, an anthropologist, rather plain by her own telling, who has come to the town to recover from a shabby "affair" with a fellow academic, as well as to study small-town village life. After doing something impetuous, she finds herself facing the same rather boring man with which she was slightly entangled and is befuddled again as to what their "relationship," if it can be called that, really means, if anything. "A Few Green Leaves" is really about what is meaningful and beautiful in our lives. So very little can mean so much to us. A true artist, Barbara Pym creates for us these village lives, with their frustrations, their humor, their longings, and their mortality. This was her last artistic effort before her own death two months after its completion. It is a fine work, and I felt the whole way that I was in the secure hands of a master story teller: wise, funny, perceptive, and profoundly literate. Bravo!

I read several Barbara Pym novels almost 30 years ago. I put them in the book case and saved them. I moved them with me 7 or 8 times. I had forgotten why I was keeping them but I kept them.
Then I re-read them. I was floored. The writing is right, I am not sure how else to explain it. The characters live their lives in smaller English towns and villages, they do this or that yet it is all there. Barbara Pym captures her people in their lives and their thoughts and writes with wit, respect and affection for them. It seems quite a few of her books have recently been re-issued. I bought them all and am reading them, one at a time, with great pleasure.
Far be it for me to compare any writer to Jane Austen but there it is.

This is a relationship-driven (ie: chick lit in an intellectual kind of way) story. It is a well-written novel about a woman named Emma Howick in her late 30's who, like so many of the other characters populating this novel, seems to be wandering through life without direction and, in Emma's case, seemingly without self-esteem.

Miss Howick is an anthropologist and takes a cottage in a small village because she wants to write a paper on the habits of this small town. There she meets again a fellow anthropologist named Graham Pettifer with whom she had a fling in her college years. He married shortly after their early relationship and when she meets him again, he and his wife are separated.

Here's where it gets sad and you wonder what the author is driving at in her depiction of Emma saying to herself she doesn't know what she feels about Graham and yet she pursues him and lets him treat her badly. I kept wondering when Emma was going to realize she deserved better than this man and/or to question the morality of dating a married man-- especially as it becomes more and more apparent he and his wife are reconciling.

We get introduced to a cast of characters in this book and I am hard put to say that any of them were people I'd like to know. Most were petty, some were bitter, and a good deal were, like Emma, people that had no self-esteem and allowed themselves to be taken advantage of in big and small ways. One of the nicest characters was the rector although, again, it seems Barbara Pym's version of a nice person is someone who lacks self-esteem, is weak-willed, and is ofter pushed about.

I have to also say that one of the things that really annoyed me was how often Pym depicted relationships between two people in which someone was dominant and pushed around the other person. This was typified in the relationship between the rector and his sister who often belittled him in small ways and when she moves in with a roommate becomes dominated by her new companion. I know there are relationships like that out there, but there are also many, many (do you hear me Barbara Pym?) relationships that are healthy where consideration and friendship reign.

The only redeeming part of the whole novel occurs at the end where it is strongly hinted that Emma will find love in the end. Couldn't Ms. Pym have written the novel starting at this period in Emma's life rather than ending the novel this way? Pym is an excellent writer, but why use that talent to sketch characters that are frustrated, petty, and lacking direction in life?

I have read several books by Barbara Pym (Jane & Prudence is her best, in my opinion) and although nothing really happens in her novels, there is nevertheless something compelling about the writing and characters which keeps you reading.
This time, I could only get through the first quarter. I cannot understand why Pym's editors never put the brakes on her obsession with spinterish women who live next to a rectory. I realize that 4 or 5 novels of Pym's is enough for me; this one was particularly excruciating.

When her protagonists are eccentric virginal types who go around quoting Byron, it is tolerable when the setting is pre-WW2 England, or just after. But in this novel, it's the 1970's - a time of emerging feminisim, consciousness raising, and political activism. And yet, once again her characters are meanding through the woods, talking about jumble sales and tea scones and arguing about who is going to arrange the flowers for the church. Enough already. This novel is boring to a degree that is nearly coma-inducing. I'm guess I'm done with Barbara Pym.

This novel was our February Book group text. It was not hard to read and had a restful quality about it. Unfortunately it did not say very much at all to me or other members of the group. Many of the characters were underdeveloped and there were hints at interesting aspects of their personalities but it did not go any further than that, so left me with a feeling of frustration and irritation. I appreciate that her forte is writing about quiet village life and the attention to detail of very mundane events but I think this can be taken too far.

This is a book club choice so I wished to be conversant for the discussion. However, I could not force myself past 100 pages. I found the style to be disjointed and just plain boring. I am not a fan of British lit in general, the plodding, prim, takes forever to say anything, much less happen style. But this novel was just painful for a reader to try and care about any of the characters. My time is too valuable with other great reads to pursue rather than this book.