Customer Reviews

Love in Idleness

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Having been blown away by reading A Vicious Circle (why isn't this published in the US, by the way??)I was expecting a more satirical edge to Love in Idleness. As others have pointed out, it's based on A Midsummer Night's Dream, with the sexes reversed, and it would have been good to have had a cast that wasn't all successful professional people. Despite this, the book is an enchanting depiction of how that two-week summer break we all long for can go wrong, then right. The satire is mostly confined to Betty, the mother/mother-in-law who, face permenently frozen by Botox and disapproval, is the real villain of the story. The dialogue is superb, and I laughed aloud at the jokes about lawyers (Theo's firm is called Cain, Innocent). Polly's plans to pair off her oldest friends (including the lecherous Ivo Sponge, from A Vicious Circle)in the setting of an idyllic Italian villa go awry, and everyone swaps partners thanks to three children and a love potion containing Viagra that may or may not work. It's like a benign version of La Ronde - witty, sophisticated, and sympathetic even to the less attractive.
I thought this written with even more assurance than A Vicious Circle, and a lightness of touch that somehow goes deeper. For a comedy, it has many melancholy touches that prevent it being just froth, and it describes is the way the world is transformed by love, and the imagination. It's easy to read, but demands an answering intelligence in the reader. The ending, incidentally,is one of the best I've read in a modern novel for a very long time.

This book is highly recommended for reading groups. It's that rare thing, a novel that is a pleasure to read which also stimulates and satisfies a literary audience. Although lighter, brighter and in some senses frothier than In a Dark Wood it is a companion piece, exploring the weird and potentially disastrous interactions between children and adults. To this end, Craig has taken the plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream and written a kind of prequel to it, with the play coming as the climax.

An Amercian lawyer, his English wife and their friends and relations gather in the Tuscan countryside outside Cortona (Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun,anyone?) The idyllic Casa Luna promises a fortnight in paradise, but the combined feelings of the guests,and especially their three appalling kids soon has the company in ferment. Polly, Theo's English wife is the moral centre of the story but each guest has his or her own character strongly drawn. Before long, the children, Tania, Bron and Robbie (read, Titania, Oberon and Puck/Robin Goodfellow) are brewing up a love potion with Viagra from granny's purse. The ensuing complications, if not quite as hilarious as A Midsummer Night's Dream, are worthy of EM Forster.

This is a delightful summer comedy that I thoroughly enjoyed -- a kind of "Shakespeare meets Oscar Wilde" in subject and wit. The plot is a contemporary version of Midsummers Night Dream, set in an idyllic Tuscan holiday home. It is the perfect book to take along on a vacation, full of fun and mischief and puns. Best of all, there is a horrible mother-in-law.

If you don't see the point of your girlfriend's chick-lit, but still like to chill this is a surprisingly good novel - intelligent, literate, psychologically complex but light as the best British fiction. As loosely based on A Midsummer Night's Dream as Charles Baxter's The Feast of Love, it concerns the lives and loves of eight adults and three children on vacation together in Italy. There is a real love potion, an obnoxious mother-in-law, a surprise coming-out, but the novel's real substance comes less from borrowed Shakespearian plot than the ever-fascinating subject of the clash between the real and the imaginary, or between adulthood and childhood. A pleasure to read.

A group of American and British people on vacation travel to the idyllic Italian setting of Casa Luna, Cortona for a fortnight and find that their expectations about what will happen are totally reversed. Craig introduces a large cast of characters who we get to know intimately over the course of the novel due to her skill at delicately portraying the psychological state of each one. She shows how Daniel's noble sensibility is at odds with his mother Betty's more ambitious goals for him. The author is able to beautifully conjure her characters sometimes in a single terse, meaningful line such as "Betty did not so much converse as hand down a smaller tablet of stone." Craig also creates the intensely fresh perspective of the young in the three children showing how their magical world melds with the vibrant physical landscape of the Italian countryside. Those that are familiar with Craig's earlier work will recognize Ivo as the mischievous critic who loves to be hated from A Vicious Circle. But even with this superficially unlikeable man, the author's meaningful phrases hint at an underlying insecurity giving his character a lot of depth. Over the course of the vacation the characters find themselves paired with the ones they could never admit to really desiring. All it takes is the madness of summer and a little fairy magic.

This is a thoroughly engaging and funny novel that is an up to date revisioning of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Although the tone of the novel maintains a comic air, Craig doesn't shy from tackling difficult social issues such as racism, sexuality and our culture's obsession with beauty. These problems are woven into the characters lives making them a fully-realized, modern and recognizable group of people. Most importantly, this book ponders the question of love in a way that is not trite or sentimental. Rather it shows the maddening confusion of it, the heart-stopping joy it brings and how it pulls us in the most unexpected ways.

I picked up this book in Cortona itself, and was enchanted from the very first page - although I have to say that sadly the town is less attractive and more touristy than that depicted in Craig's novel or Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun. The arrival of the Nobles, their family and friends (and particularly Betty, the mother-in-law who immediately commandeers the best bed in the house)were instantly and hilariously true to life. Yet there is also a deeper strain to the story, about the imagination and its powers to transform the way we see others, both erotically and as individuals. A novel about love and sex, it is also about children and literature. I was interested to see, after looking her up on the Internet, that Craig is a notable reviewer of children's books for the London Times. Perhaps this accounts for her remarkable portrayal of the way children, as well as their parents, see the world.

This novel reminded me a little of one of my favourite books, THE INN AT LAKE DIVINE. Not because it tackles anti-Semitism, but because it has one truly obnoxious mother-figure, plus a cast of engagingly innocent young adults. I was surprised to see one reader objected to the portrayal of the children, which struck me as completely spot-on - and I have to say that, as a veteran of sharing holiday homes, Polly could have been my own self-portrait. Maybe that makes me a door-mat too....Anyway, it's a really clever, charming romantic comedy that made me want to visit Tuscany even more than Frances Mayes book did. Furthermore, it had a lot of ideas simmering away about the nature of children's grasp of what is real and what is imaginary. Plus, the ending made me sigh with contentment.

The conflicts of modern life. Allusions to Shakespeare effortlessly incorporated. Vivid characters. Fresh, memorable metaphors. A touch of magic. Innocence. Deviltry. All this, plus a plot that twists, turns, and makes you laugh and think at the same time. Love in Idleness is good enough to warrant a second perusal, just to catch the delicious detail missed in the first reading.

While I enjoyed the allusions to A Midsummer Night's Dream, one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, I found this book far from satisfying. Craig evokes the Italian landscape beautifully, but I couldn't get past my disgust with some of the characters. Betty is horrid, but she's supposed to be; the problem is with characters we're meant to view sypathetically. Polly is a spritless doormat, only slightly evolved by the end of the book, and her two children are among the most hateful, odious brats I've ever seen in fiction. Craig apparently writes children's books as well as reviewing them; I hope she doesn't think all children are as rude and insensitive as those she portrays here. Quite polluted an otherwise pleasant read.

This book will appeal to those saearching for a classy romantic comedy. But between the jokes and the lyrical descriptions of Italy, as in Craig's other books, there are deeper questions being raised. The children in this updating of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream take on the role of the fairies. Is this because we need the raw energy and passion of children to really see things as they are? Or are they just meddlesome trouble-makers playing with potions and cobwebs? The characters fall in and out love - and most importantly, as with Craig's other books, seek to learn how to be true to their own best natures.