Customer Reviews

This Cold Country

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

 

 

A smart book with rich, mature writing. After a wave of gee-aren't-I-clever tomes, like "A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius" and "The Corrections" I was thrilled to get this passed to me by a friend.

Davis-Goff is amusing and intelligent, telling a story of a young woman in a time and place that seems very far away and, in the shadow of recent world events, not that distant at the same time. This book is not packed with action, just wonderful words -- it will remind you why you like reading so much in the first place.

I read this over one weekend. Daisy Creed is like any good Austen heroine. She's plucky, determined, and Davis-Goff spices up rich writing with biting commentary on the manners and motivations of a different time and place. I can't say I knew anything about Ireland before I read the book. Now I want to go there. I just fear that sixty years after the action of this book takes place, I won't find what I'm looking for anywhere except in another novel.

I thought this novel was brilliant. The author captured the class consciousness that defined Britain well into the 20th century. Daisy recognizes her place in the social system;she feels slightly superior, as the daughter of educated parents,to the other WWII Land Girl, yet not completely at ease with the "landed gentry' she works for. While several reviewers berate Goff for not fully developing her characters, I would like to offer a Brit's perspective. In her defense, I believe the author, through her subtle character interactions,allows us to experience the insidiousness and ultimate downfall of a class system based on assumed nobility or old wealth. When Daisy finally figures out the desperate financial status of this gentrified family she has married into, she stands out in her bid to salvage the ancestral home by actually taking in paying guests, anathema to a social class that had relied on a good name and a forgiving feudal class to maintain an unrealistic standard of living. Daisy's entrepeneurship is in direct contrast to the family and others of that class who by their ineffectuality seem to invite their own demise.It is a harbinger of the social upheaval to come in Britain and the emergence of the middle class In many ways,Goff's writing reflects the understated style of Kazuo Ishiguro in the context of Remains of the Day, where there is also a maddening sense of non-resolution.It seems to me that an author can be just as judicious about leaving details out as including them. I believe Goff wanted her readers to reflect on the turmoil that war presents on both personal and political levels. And she used her characters well to demonstrate how the human spirit can cope or fail.

Annabel Davis-Goff wrote two wonderfully evocative books about her Irish roots-- "The Dower House" and "Walled Gardens." Unfortunately, she has either run out of material or she wrote "This Cold Country" in haste. We begin, for no apparent reason, following Daisy on a farm in Wales, where she works as a land girl. Rather quickly, she marries and moves to Ireland where she has to manage a very large house with little guidance. (Where are we but the familiar territory plumbed by Daphne DuMaurier in "Rebecca?") Questions about her asocial brother-in-law Mickey are never answered. (What's wrong with him? Does he really keep bats?) It's not clear why we sometimes veer from Daisy's point-of-view to enter the mind of her near-catatonic grandmother-in-law. And the atmosphere of the war years just doesn't ring quite true. (Does anyone in the entire novel smoke a cigarette?) The plot is thin and wrapped up in a perfunctory manner in the end. All in all, not Davis-Goff's best work despite a bit of really fine writing.

I picked up this title hoping to lose myself in an engrossing tale with some emotional intensity to it. Instead, I found myself asking over and over again, "Why am I still reading?" I am not familiar with Ms. Davis-Goff's other writings, so perhaps this was simply not her best effort. The story became duller and thinner as I continued to slog through the Irish mists which it attempts to invoke.

The beginning of the story drew me in, as the main character, 20-year old Daisy Creed, finds her life suddenly altered by the coming of war. Sadly, as soon as Daisy marries and moves to Ireland the narrative becomes attenuated to the point that I lost sympathy for her and her eccentric in-laws. The author's attempts to insert short snippets of Irish history into the narrative were annoying and not sufficiently illuminating for a reader who comes to the story without a background knowledge of the subject. There were also some careless flaws in sentence structure that left me wondering whether anyone read the proofs before publication.

Handled more carefully, this story might have been full of a subtle, haunting ambience. I kept thinking this elusive goal was just disappearing around the next page as I read, but I was never able to catch up to it. The title says it all. Frustrating.

I don't understand the reviews that complain about a lack of passion, because I found this book incredibly intense, so much so that I forgot that it was fiction. I guess these days everything has to be spelled out, whereas this writer, by mere suggestion, conjures up a whole world, including a world of emotion. The book is flawed, however, by a sense that the author could have told us so much more (however subtly), and by an unsatisfying ending. Perhaps not knowing how to conclude, the author wraps it up with cliches along the lines of "Nothing would ever be the same."

This book started well with Daisy, working as a landgirl, meeting Patrick whom she marries in a short time. After moving to his ancestral home in S. Ireland, she meets his rather odd family and finds out the family are in dire financial straits. There is a murder which is never solved in the book, also can Daisy resurrect her marriage eventually? There are other events never fully explained which left me feeling unsatisfied. I searched to find out if the author had written a sequel which would explain what happened to all the characters, but there is none. The book starts at the beginning of World War 2 in 1940 and ends in 1942 so everything is left hanging in the plot. Not a good ending.

I found this book to be more boring as it went along. The characters are thin and undeveloped -- couldn't even get a handle on Daisy and what made her the way she was, or the other characters for that matter. They just seem to appear out of nowhere. The reader is denied any glimpse into the development of Daisy's romance. The prose is thin and boring, the author shows no gift for a turn of phrase. Even a bad plot can be saved by wonderful writing -- this book gave me no investment in anything going on. I only finished it because I blew 20 bucks on it.

If you're looking for a lot of Irish blarney, this book is not for you. However, if you appreciate a subtle but moving story by a surperbly talented writer, try this book. Daisy is a terrific heroine and her coming of age story will move you to tears.

I enjoyed the first hundred pages of this book, as Daisy, a 20 year old English girl, tries to find her way in the world. But after she marries and moves to Ireland, the book starts to drag. The characters she meets there are never fully fleshed out, so their eccentricities seem incomprehensible.

I skimmed the second half.

I recommend The Dower House, also by Annabel David Goff, instead of this book.