Customer Reviews

House in the Country

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

 

 

Jocelyn Playfair's 1944 novel is set in a great Georgian country house, which has been billeted by all manner of homeless Englishmen, during the fall of Tobruk in 1942. The great house, of course, is a symbol of England (as it so often is in the English novel), and Playfair's work is a fairly sophisticated and earnest attempt to grapple with some of the larger questions posed by the second World War to the English people: is it possible to ever go back to "normal"? Was it a mistake to attempt to go back to "norma;" after the first World War? Must people be willing to sacrifice willingly if anything is to be learned from the wars at all? The novel thus becomes very much in the tradition of the great essay-novels of the modern period, including Woolf's JACOB'S ROOM and THE YEARS and Wells's CHRISTINA ALBERTA'S FATHER and ANN VERONICA; Playfair is a bit less successful than Woolf or Wells, though, in that her characters are often so idealized. Her heroine Cressida is so beautiful and kind and noble that it is--all too unfortunately--easy to imagine her played by Greer Garson; similarly, her wounded hero Charles Valery, agonized by the war, seems of the Leslie Howard variety. You wish the major characters were as memorable as the minor characters (such as Cressida's formidable wealthy aunt).