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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating emotional study set in pre-war England,
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This review is from: Kind Are Her Answers (Hardcover)
Mary Renault is overwhelmingly best known for her historical novels set in ancient Greece. But she began her career as a novelist closer to home, writing about personal relationships in the England of the 1930s and 1940s. The link can be found in "The Charioteer", published in 1945, which was followed only a year later by "The Last of the Wine". Although both titles belong to the world of ancient Athens, "The Charioteer" is actually set in an English hospital in the aftermath of Dunkirk."Kind are her Answers" was Renault's second novel, published in 1940 but wholly pre-war in every way. It is told from the point of view of Dr Kit Anderson, a young general practitioner who lives with his beautiful but self-centred and unloving wife in a small town not far from London. Like so many of Renault's heroes, Kit is portrayed as well-nigh perfect (within the inevitable limits of human nature), but doomed to emotional turmoil through the inevitable entanglements with women. This is clear from the book's title, the opening line of Thomas Campion's poem of 1617 which includes the lines, "Lost is our freedom,/When we submit to women so:/Why do we need 'em/When in their best they work our woe?" Anderson is clever, generous, and high-principled, but nevertheless finds himself in a difficult position when his wife continues to reject his advances long after a near-fatal stillbirth. Inevitably, he is then thrown together with Chrissie, a charming free-spirited actress whom he quickly comes to see as his ideal soulmate. Add the extra pressure of a doctor's heavy case load and routine responsibility for people's life or death, a crotchety stiffnecked senior partner, and the need to avoid compromising either Chrissie's honour or his medical ethics, and Kit faces an almost impossible obstacle course. Even so early in her career, Renault was already showing deep insights into human nature and an inclination to dissect ethical dilemmas with an unforgivingly honest eye. Some readers may be upset by her lifelong tendency to see the best in her male characters and the worst - or at least quite a lot of bad faith - in her female ones. On the face of it, "Kind are her Answers" is a simple, rather superficial psychological study; but whatever you think of its construction, it is hard to avoid being swept up in the emotional whirlwind it engenders. If you like any of Renault's later books, I don't think you will be disappointed in this early one.
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