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Tag Archives: class system

The End of an Era: The Passing Bells

02 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1914, characterization, class system, England, First World War, historical fiction, military blunders, Phillip Rock, prejudice

Review: The Passing Bells, by Phillip Rock
Morrow, 1978. 516 pp. $16

As my regular readers have probably figured out by now, I seldom pick up a family saga. Normally, when I scan the library shelves for historical fiction, I avoid those novels whose jacket illustration shows a beautiful woman standing in front of a magnificent ancestral home. Not that I have anything against such novels; I simply sense that they weren’t written with me in mind.

However, The Passing Bells is about the First World War, my historical specialty and favorite subject as a novelist. I’ve also read that the late Phillip Rock knew his stuff, and that he chose his title from the first line of Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth” suggests as much. So I gave the book a shot.

Heaton Hall, Manchester, England (Courtesy PublicDomainPictures.net).

Heaton Hall, Manchester, England (Courtesy Public DomainPictures.net).

There’s a lot to like about The Passing Bells, the first novel of a trilogy. Rock indeed portrays the England of 1914 and after with a keen grasp of history, issues, and, most visibly in this book, social prejudices. The Grevilles of Abingdon Pryory, an earldom created in Tudor times, wear their superiority like their perfectly tailored formal clothes and need not reflect on their values, outlook, way of life, or how they treat others. In other words, they’re absolutely insufferable and likely to remain so.

Rock’s narrative argues that the Greville mindset typifies what holds England back from political, social, or scientific progress. Come the war, this thinking is particularly disastrous, for its aristocratic purveyors see nothing wrong with sending legions of Britons to the ugliest deaths imaginable so long as the enemy pays a commensurate price. The old trope that the men who fought that war were lions led by donkeys is on display here, to potent effect. You see it not only at Gallipoli and the Somme, but among staff officers safely in England or behind the lines in France. Rock’s war is that of self-inflicted wounds, hopeless attacks, and overwhelmed aid stations; the nursing scenes are particularly gripping and true to life.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. As the novel opens in the late spring of 1914, Martin Rilke, Lady Greville’s journalist nephew from Chicago, visits Abingdon Pryory before setting out on a brief Continental tour, reporter’s notebook in hand. He’s warm, open, loud, and very badly dressed, just what you’d expect an American to be, swimming in a sea of blue-bloods. Martin’s also got more on his mind than the subject that transfixes everyone else: who’s going to marry which spoiled, gorgeous, young woman, and whether the stuffy, old earl will allow the match. (It’s telling, though, that Martin’s eye immediately falls on a pretty housemaid, newly hired and worried about losing her job; apparently, she’s got too much character to transform herself into the liveried robot her station requires.)

Over the coming weeks, war draws closer, and life as the Grevilles know it is about to end. Nobody can say exactly what’s in the air, but in London, Martin senses it:

It appeared to Martin that the streets of the city never emptied. . . .Perhaps it was no more than the unusually hot weather that drove people, mainly young men, from their rooms and set them to wandering in restless bands through the West End. The groups were orderly–excessively polite, as a matter of fact–and the police were not concerned. It was almost Bank Holiday time and a certain anticipatory excitement was normal. And yet, somehow, this behavior could not be explained that easily.

What I don’t like about The Passing Bells is the two-dimensional characterizations. Only a handful of a large cast show any depth, and only two or three can be said to have inner lives. Martin’s a very nice guy, but once he corrects his wardrobe, he’s got no flaws to speak of. The earl’s attitudes ring shudderingly true, but there’s little humanity to him, even when he knows nobody’s watching. His daughter, Alexandra, remains a ravishingly beautiful twit until she becomes a nurse, but that takes half the book; ditto the dashing Coldstream Guards captain who acquires substance (and a conscience) only after he sees combat.

As a consequence, it’s hard to care about these people. But The Passing Bells does depict the time very well.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

This Old House: Ashenden

09 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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Basildon Park, class system, country estates, Elizabeth Wilhide, historical fiction, interlocking short stories, mansion, Pride and Prejudice

Review: Ashenden, by Elizabeth Wilhide
Simon & Schuster, 2012. 339 pp. $25
I knew this novel bore no relation to a short-story collection of the same title by Somerset Maugham, about a secret-service agent during World War I. And when I saw that the author had written interlocking stories spanning the two-and-a-half-century life of an English country home, I almost slid the book back onto the library shelf. Stories don’t a novel make.

Basildon Park, the model for Ashenden (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Basildon Park, the model for Ashenden (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

But I took a chance, and Ashenden rewarded me. Wilhide, who has written on interior decorating and architecture, has created a pretty good novel out of subtle joinery, rather like the decorative carpentry that gives the Ashenden mansion some of its interior charm. (For Austen fans, Wilhide says she based the architecture on Basildon Park, where a 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice was filmed.) I never felt the house become a character, which Wilhide was clearly trying to achieve. But Ashenden provides the setting for, and symbol of, an engrossing tale of social conflict, competition, envy, striving, and prejudice. There’s romance too, of course; I particularly liked how the historical chapters show how social class permeates everything, including the right to expect love.

Oddly, Ashenden stumbles only in the first and last chapters, the present-day narrative of two siblings who’ve inherited the place, which needs such extensive repair that they can’t afford to keep it. I don’t find this situation compelling, especially compared with the historical chapters, which put much more at stake. Worse, the present-day characters seem idealized, and they’re bound to Ashenden as an artifact. Had they understood all that had happened under its roof, they might have had more to struggle with. But by the end, only the reader can know that, which is a flaw in the novel’s construction.

That said, Ashenden has its pleasures. Though Wilhide indulges in unnecessary foreshadowings, my number-two pet peeve of the month, otherwise, she seldom explains too much, which separates her from many first novelists (and from more experienced authors who should know better). Likewise, I was rarely able to guess who’d show up from a previous chapter, or in what guise. The interlocking chapters actually interlock, as the social themes recombine in various ways. My favorites deal with the eighteenth-century architect who had the house built; a servant in the late 1880s; a boating party just before the First World War; and what happened in the house during that war.

The opening of the latter chapter shows Wilhide’s descriptive pen:


 

In some parts of the country near the south coast you can hear a dull murderous boom come over the Channel, an ominous blood pulse. Not here. Here a dog’s bark annoys the ordinary silence the way it has always done and will do again, a wood pigeon hidden in a beech tree utters its lilting, repetitive coo, a freshening wind shivers through the leaves and drops again to a hush.


 

The author also has a sharp sense of social commentary. In the present-day chapters, which portray the yuppiness of the neighborhood, a woman pushes “a red three-wheeled baby buggy the size of a small car . . . conveying its little emperor.” One heir to Ashenden, who lives in New York, thinks that England suffers “the drip, drip, drip of a small island at the fag end of its history and refusing to admit it.”

Had I judged Ashenden by its cover (which depicts the back of a young woman staring out the window of a grand house), I might have put it aside. Tsk, tsk.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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