Blaming

This story concerns Amy, an older English woman whose husband dies early in the book whilst they are on a cruise, and Martha, a younger American on the same holiday who stays behind to help her. But it’s quite an odd, somewhat dysfunctional relationship. Martha doesn’t seem to provide much actual help and Amy doesn’t want to keep up the friendship with Martha after they return home. A lot of the character’s actions seem to be motivated by what society expects them to do rather than what they want to do, and read through modern eyes that looks like a whole lot of masking. But the characters do a lot of reflecting themselves and the ‘blaming’ of the title happens in the end.

I found the main characters and their ambivalent relationship highly believable, but the minor characters were as well. There was a lot going on behind the scenes that was only hinted at in the text. Amy’s two young granddaughters seemed especially well written to me. The book was published in 1976 which I guess makes me about the age of the youngest granddaughter in the book too :D

It feels very much like a novel about the end of an era and not just in Amy’s life as she is catapulted into widowhood. It’s a look at how society is changing. It was also Elizabeth Taylor’s last book, published posthumously. I’ve enjoyed a couple of her books before (though the last one was eighteen years ago!) and found this one in the library where my brain was vaguely searching for mid twentieth century writing to escape from the present day. It had exactly the kind of quiet vibe I was after. It’s mostly about the characters and the relationships between them, but with a decent amount of plot twists as the book goes on which made it very easy to keep reading. I thank the author of the introduction for not spoiling the plot in case you read it first but also for realising that readers have been trained to come to the introduction last, as I did, just in case.