Customer Reviews

Titmuss Regained

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In his second go at the inhabitants of his own "dear country," the fictional Rapstone Valley, John Mortimer shows his despicable antihero Leslie Titmuss having his own second go at courtship and marriage. The lovely widow Jenny Sidonia seems everything Titmuss missed in his first marriage to the neurotic Charlotte Fanner: physically lovely and sweet tempered, Jenny (formerly the wife of a liberal Oxbridge don) is also willing to overlook Leslie's politics and settle down with him in the former Fanner estate Rapstone Manor. But the planned invasion of a new township threatens to unsettle their happiness in the Rapstone Valley... and as a Tory cabinet minister, Leslie cannot risk blocking the new plans for his own domestic comfort...

Mortimer's 1990 sequel to PARADISE POSTPONED doesn't hit the manic comic highs of its predecessor, but its still a beautifully constructed novel that gives us again a good sense of everything Mortimer thinks is wrong with England, from the loathsome machinations of a Tory-controlled press to the self-serving and cruel rhetoric employed by Leslie himself, to the ineffectual protests and perceived kookiness of Leslie's enemies on the left. (The true hero of PARADISE POSTPONED, Dr. Fred Simcox, is back here, both as a potential rival for Jenny's affections and as an opponent to the Rapstone Valley development scheme.) If there is something a bit predictable about Mortimer's constant nostalgia for his own vanishing England (and weren't the Simcox brewery or the neighboring town's biscuit factory likely seen as blights on the landscape when they were built, despite Mortimer's mourning for them?), he does achieve something pretty near to first rate in his portrait of Titmuss's marriage to Jenny. In this Mortimer approximates something of what George Meredith did in THE EGOIST, in its unforgettable portrait of an intelligent and lovely young woman horrified to realize she's mistakenly tied herself to a monster.

The surprising thing about Mr. Mortimer's book, as opposed to his Rumpole series (which are really fun reads) is his precisely perfect descriptions of emotions and the depth of his characters. They all live (and die) with grace and a certain dignity, even when naughty. This is a lively if not happy-ending book which is excellent from start to finish. Nobody is likely to be satisfied with the result, which is exactly as we live life. Sometimes I wanted to wring a few necks to get these folks to understand what was happening and make them change. Which is Mr. Mortimer's objective. He knows his stuff.