Love in Idleness: A Novel [Hardcover]

Amanda Craig (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 22, 2003

In her latest novel, Amanda Craig once again demonstrates not only her splendid skill for storytelling but also her incisive wit as she spins Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream into a delightful modern-day tale of love and lies, set against the magical landscape of Tuscany.

When an American lawyer, Theo Noble, and his English wife, Polly, rent an Italian villa–the Casa Luna–for their vacation, they envision an idyllic summer spent in the relaxing company of good friends and family: an eclectic Anglo-American mix. They have invited Theo’s brother, Daniel, as well as their friends Hemani and Ellen, to join them. While their children Tania and Robbie will have Hemani’s son, Bron, to play with, Polly hopes her mother-in-law can be counted on to control Tania’s and Robbie’s wild imaginations by force of a personality that can curdle mayonnaise at thirty paces. Even the arrival of Ivo Sponge, the journalist who Ellen–for some reason–detests most in the world, seems unlikely to interfere with the pleasure of exploring art and nature. But the Casa Luna is a place of enchantment and anyone who lives there risks discovering aspects of themselves and other people that go deeper than any clash of cultures. As the temperature rises, it soon becomes increasingly hard to tell what is imaginary and what is real.

Love in Idleness is at once a deft interpretation of Shakespeare and a delectable contemporary comedy of manners that is certain to captivate.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this lighthearted romp, Craig's second novel to be published in the U.S. (after In a Dark Wood), Theo, a successful American businessman residing in London with his wife, Polly, and their son and daughter, Robbie and Tania, rent a house in Tuscany for a two-week vacation. With match-making intentions, they invite seven friends, including an Indian-British divorc‚e, Hemani, with a young son, Bron; former model Ellen; three eligible bachelors; and, most formidable of all, Theo's starchy mother. At the end of the first week, Polly is doing all the work, her relationship with Theo is crumbling, the hoped-for romances are not materializing and the three youngsters are fighting with one another. Only the owner of the house, a "W. Shade," is absent. The vacation appears to be a failure, but something of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream haunts the lush forest nearby, especially when Tania, with the advice of sparkle-sized fairy folk, prepares and administers a potion to the adults. The romantic entanglements that ensue might flummox even Shakespeare; one is not between a previously argumentative couple at all, but between two men, one of whom is Theo. Craig is perhaps too leisurely about introducing the quasi-fantasy element, but it works, and when the mysterious W. Shade finally arrives, he is in for a romantic surprise of his own. This is amusing, featherweight stuff, and readers who love to see posh vacationers gamboling about in Italy will eat it up.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School-When a group of American and English friends gather at a house in Tuscany for a two-week vacation, they find more than they bargained for. A sophisticated bunch, they are modern royalty of a sort-celebrities in their fields-but they can't seem to jell as a group, and matchmaking efforts fail, too. Married or single, they are all out of step. The three children-two boys and a girl-squabble like any youngsters, but when, in brief but lovely passages, the author reveals something of their consciousness, they become a link to an underlying magic. Running wild in the countryside, they find fairies who give the girl recipes for potions. The children use them to induce the adults to love the right people, but of course these plans go awry. On Midsummer Night, mysterious forces conspire to draw everyone into the woods and keep them all there. Or did they just get lost? Was this really magic, or just the effervescence of discovering life's possibilities in a new setting? This is a bright, amusing story, and for readers who have already succumbed to the charm of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, it will be a special treat. Craig evokes the fey qualities of the well-loved play with many references to characters and situations, and she captures to perfection the quality of a midsummer enchantment.
Christine C. Menefee, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Nan A. Talese; 1st edition (July 22, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385507763
• ISBN-13: 978-0385507769
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,768,510 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not what I expected from the author of A Vicious Circle, but, April 5, 2004

By 

adrian tap (London, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Love in Idleness: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars highly recommended, September 29, 2003

By 

"janebourne" (San Francisco, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Love in Idleness: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shakespeare meets Oscar Wilde, September 15, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Love in Idleness: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.