Customer Reviews

The World My Wilderness (Virago Modern Classics)

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Barbary has been living happily with her divorced mother in the south of France, and has spent the war years as a junior member of the Resistance. Apparently she has been involved in the murder of her French stepfather, considered by the Reistance to be a collaborator, so her mother banishes her to london to live with the father she hasn't seen since she was a young child. She escapes from the tedium of her father's very conventional household with her stepbrother Raoul, and together they explore the London bombsites, and meet the people who hide there, army deserters and black marketeers. Barbary longs to return to France and her adored mother, but will her mother ever forgive her for her part in her stepfather's death? Barbary is a fascinating character, a teenager old beyond her years, intense and fierce, and hopelssly lost in her father's narrow, conventional world. Not as funny as some of Rose macaulay's other novels, but a fascinating and absorbing story.

Not as strong as The Towers of Trebizond but a great read nonetheless. This is the novel that Macaulay--one of a number of now relatively unsung British women novelists of the 1950s who were so good (inc. Barbara Pym, Pamela Hansford Johnson, et al.)--wrote after her friends thought she'd given up novel-writing. It's an absorbing tale. The central character is someone who grows on you and your heart aches for her. The novel well conveys a world that is now invisible to tourists visiting London: the wreckage and ruin, physical and human, in the period immediately following the conclusion of the Second World War. Things have changed; morality and religion are not what they were. Macaulay knew this London well and her sentences are well constructed, her writing clear and effective, often beautiful. It's a novel that is well worth spending time with.

Book arrived in good time and in good shape. I am completely satisfied with this purchase.

Rose Macaulay often tried out many different styles when she wrote her novels, and was often very successful. Here, alas, she seems to have wandered into the territory of her protegeé Elizabeth Bowen with less than ideal results. Here, a typical Bowenesque unwanted teenage girl, Barbary, is forced to leave her once divorced, once widowed mother in Provence after World War II to live with her bourgeois father Sir Gulliver and his new wife in London and attend the Slade Art School. Left to her own devices, the heavyhandedly named Barbary (who used to fight with the maquis in France) wanders the bombed-out ruins in the City instead. The unusual setting is just about irresistible, and you wish Macaulay could do somehting more with it, but the obvious resonances to THE DEATH OF THE HEART keep hampering the book, and Barbary and her selfish mother and chilly father and stepmother are too shallow to care much about. There's also practically none of Macaulay's trademark humor.