Customer Reviews

The Light Years (Cazalet Chronicle)

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The Light Years (Cazalet Chronicle, Vol 1) by Elizabeth Jane Howard. Climb aboard as three generations of the Cazalet family (and assorted relatives and servants) prepare to board the WWII Train that is threatening to pull into the station. Many, many characters, some lovable, some not. The children and their irrepressible adventures and clever dialogue are my favorite, followed by Hugh and Sybil, who don't quite meet in the station for trying to please each other. Of course Grandfather, with his inane invitations and muddling but very cunning schemes, is a dear. This series seems a place to dwell, become one of the family, with the reader being able to have the perspective of seeing within each character. No, there isn't a beginning and ending or "plot," but the reader will find humanity and joy and family. Volumes 2,3 and 4 await this reader.

Have you ever met a family so intriguing you just wanted to be part of them immediately and never say goodbye? That's how the Cazalets affected me. From the opening scene when the maids rise early to prepare their morning tea until the closing page when the children's schoolteacher buries her long-held secret, this family draws you into their upper class English home.

The story begins in 1937 England as the family, already touched deeply by WWI, prepares for the coming of WWII. The doddering patriarch (affectionately called "Brig") and the matriarch (always referred to as "Duchy") gather their children and extended family at the summer home in Sussex to escape the dangers of London. Hugh, the eldest son, has lost his hand in the previous war, but is making a good life with his wife Sybil and their children; Edward, the middle son, loves his wife Villy but has a mistress and a horrifying secret that threatens one of his children; the younger son, Rupert, has lost his first wife in childbirth and has remarried a much younger, beautiful airhead. The lone sister cares for her aging parents while keeping secret a forbidden romance.

What is most amazing about this book is the way the author is able to capture each of the three generations so beautifully. Most appealing are the descriptions and dialogue she gives the children. There are 12 of them, and each one more appealing, more endearing, and more precocious than the next.

This is a wonderful look at how the English people prepared for WWII and the effects war had on them, particularly the children. It is a comfortable, engrossing book filled with characters you'll love and some you'll despise. Prepare to laugh out loud in some parts and shed a tear in other parts. And, if you're like me, prepare to order "Marking Time" (Volume 2 of the series) immediately.

This is the first of a four-book series about the relatively wealthy family Cazalet, a large British family in pre-war England. The family consists of William and his wife Kitty, their four children, their spouses and grandchildren, as well as the servants and close friends and relations. He is always referred to as "The Brig" and she as "Duchy," short for the Brigadier and the Duchess although he has never been in military service, nor is his wife truly a duchess. Their children consist of three boys, all married, two of whom went to war (officers, of course) in the First World War. The daughter is unmarried and in love with another woman, but there is no sexual relationship.

The interplay of relationships, the sometimes-Victorian moirés and values, the amenities they enjoy compared to the lower, servant class, their views of world politics, education and marital and extra-marital sex are not only entertaining, but also instructive--for the author is obviously personally familiar with the environment and people she portrays. Howard was born in London and lives in Suffolk.

The book begins in 1937, in pre-war England. The Brig is head of a successful lumber company dealing in exotic hardwoods, and has brought his two WW1 veteran sons, Hugh (who lost an arm in the conflict) and handsome Edward (who is a rake) into the firm. His other son, Rupert is a schoolteacher and painter who lost a wife in childbrith and replaced her with a 23-year-old selfish airhead beauty whom his children detest. Each of the sons have children. Each summer they all go to the country and live together with the boys' parents, together with their servants and friends, including Rachel, the maiden sister who lives with their parents the year-'round, and her female friend, half Jewish Sid.

There is no single over-arching conflict, except for the looming Second World War on the immediate horizon and speculation about it. The novel dwells, instead, on the innumerable small crises in the individual families--particularly the children.

The book is extremely well-written. The author has several other books, plays and movie scripts to her credit and her skill is not only obvious but well-earned. I am looking forward to reading the other books in this series. This one has been a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.

Joseph H. Pierre
Author of The Road to Damascus: Our Journey Through Eternity

For people who are hopelessly bored and disappointed with 90 percent of modern fiction, this book (and the others in the Cazalet Chronicle series) is well researched, and there is a rich tapestry of many lively, interesting characters of all ages and walks of life. You will need more patience than the average television audience, but I have found the books richly rewarding. I would put Elizabeth Howard's style somewhere midway between Leo Tolstoy and Maeve Binchy. The Cazalet Chronicle books also provide a colorful look into the second world war from British citizens' experience, rather than that of dry history books or the American experience.

The book The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard, is a well written classic that documents family life and relationships before, during and after World War II in England. It is a story that draws you into the lives of each of the characters and alternates giving first person accounts of what they are experiencing. The book centers on the three generations of the Cazalet family spending their summers under one roof in their summer home in Sussex. You watch all of the charactors grow up, change as people, and go through all the things in life that we all experience at some point. The Light Years is only part one of the Cazalet chronicle so don't miss out on the sequel Marking Time.

Having decided it was high time I revisted the Cazalet Family (having read the Chronicles well over 20 years ago), I decided to "read" Book I, The Light Years, by listening to the superb Books on Tape unabridged version. I just loved it, from start to finish, and recommend it highly, especially for chilly fall evenings when one needs a good, meaty story.

The Light Years introduces the reader to three generations of the wealthy, upper-class Cazalet Family, of London and the countryside (the parents' estate) in the uneasy pre-War years of 1937 and 1938. Here, as in so many well-written books about this particular time period in England, we are on the very cusp of a way of life that will disappear forever during the war, never to return. The rigidly structured society, completely ignorant of the lower classes and their needs and wants, was doomed as never before, and that sense of doom is exquisitely portrayed, not in words, but in subtleties all through this first book.

The Cazalets are in a charmed world of their own, and although they are intelligent, mostly kind, very open-minded in many cases, and truly nice people in others, in fact they haven't a clue about what is to come to destroy their world and that of their society. England between the wars was such a tenuous, almost careful time, based on all of the books written about that particular microcosm, and this book seems to capture every essence and feeling, so delicately and yet so unforgettably.

From the most senior Cazalets, the elderly Brig and his wife, the Duchy, to their brood of children: Edward and Hugh, each having fought in World War I (one unscathed, one deeply wounded in body and soul), unmarried daughter Rachel, a lesbian who does not know her own bent, and younger son Rupert, shakily married to a much-younger woman upon the loss of his first wife, each is a true human being facing his or her own fears and doubts against the backdrop of a larger reality.

The daughters-in-law: Edward's wife Villie, grappling with an unwanted pregnancy and trying to ignore her husband's philandering; Hugh's Sybil, always self-effacing in the face of her husband's terrible wounds; and Rupert's silly Zoe, who is terrified of losing him, form the strength of the family along with the matriarch, the Duchy.

But it is the children, all the cousins who gather with their parents at the grandparents' summer estate, who truly speak the hopes and fears of a generation wanting to live a normal life while terrified of a faceless man named Hitler who might destroy it all.

This book stands up to its third reading (albeit by tape) as well as it did the first, and I look forward very much to the second in the series. For those who love generational family novels, The Cazalet Chronicles is a wonderful choice for very happy reading.

The Cazalet Chronicles books are escapism at its best. You cannot put down these books, as you become immersed in the lives of this family as you come to love many of them (and sometimes hate some of them). As they cope with growing up, growing old, and enduring the hardships of World War II England, they endear themselves to the reader as few literary characters are able to do. For the sake of the readers, let us hope that Casting Off will NOT be Howard's last installment in this wonderful series.

I have just finished reading this novel and I am already on the lookout for the other 3 volumes in this series. The character development in this book was wonderful. This book appeared to be mostly about getting to know the Cazalet family rather than trying to follow an action-packed plot. The children were especially well-drawn. After watching their development from 1937-1938, I am especially curious to see what will happen to them as they grow up. Another strong point of this book is the author's ability to teach about British society of the time without being too obvious. She shows, rather than tells, what goes in English households in order to make her points.

The dust jacket of The Light Years, the first in the Cazalet series, compares the book to the "Upstairs, Downstairs" television series from the BBC. And there is a certain resemblance, of course, as there would be with any upper-class English family of the early 20th century. However, Elizabeth Jane Howard's book is more like Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited or Jane Austen's Emma -- a leisurely stroll of a novel where the character development is much more important than any plot line. You'll find you really care how each of the major characters changes and grows -- whether adults or children.

The Light Years also made me realize for the first time how constrained women's lives were, even as late as 1937.

This is a book that will sneak up on you. If it were a movie, it would be disparaged as a "chick flick." However, you won't realize how much you like it until you've finished the last page and feel cheated that it's ended. I immediately ordered the next book, Marking Time.

As a reader whose primary interest is historical accounts and memoirs of World War II, I've shied away from novels about the conflict. I've read some, of course: Mailer's Naked and the Dead, Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-5, Theodore Pleiver's great trilogy about the Eastern Front, for example.

But I had always felt that this war was one that no novelist could understand. Part of this, I'm sure, came from the fact that my parents and their families were victims of the Nazis. I didn't want to be reading something about the war that was "made up." The war was too close to too many of those I loved.

The Novel Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard, however, has changed my attitude to fiction about the war. Reading this novel, I felt closer to the war than I had for a long time, and I am looking forward to reading the other novels in this tetralogy. Howard's knowledge of history and her comprehension of what people must have felt as the war approached are absolutely convincing. It's almost like reading a secret diary of that time.

I've not experienced anything else like her book.