The Home

I’ve come across the British Library Crime Classics, bookshops have seemed to be full of them in the last few years, so presumably readers like them too, but I’ve only been tempted to read them a couple of times and haven’t been that impressed. I hadn’t realised they were also pulling other lesser known works out of the archives and publishing them though. This book is part of the British Library Women Writers series, which is “a curated collection of twentieth-century novels by female authors who enjoyed broad, popular appeal in their day”. This is the kind of thing that sounds right up my street. I hadn’t heard of the series until I perused this one in the library but this won’t be the last one I read.

This book was published in 1971, set in contemporary times, and focuses on Eleanor who is divorcing from Graham; they have five mostly grown up children who wander in and out of the story as Eleanor tries to find her feet in her new home. You can see why it got picked for republication as it was published in the year that the divorce laws were reformed to allow no-fault divorces in the UK. That aspect of the divorce isn’t particularly called out here though, it’s clear pretty much straight away that there have been affairs on both sides during Eleanor and Graham’s marriage, though it’s Graham who is instantly set up with a younger girlfriend.

It’s the aspect of the younger girlfriend that really dated this book for me. There is lots of other stuff that feels rather hideous today, chiefly the attitudes towards homosexuality from some of the characters, though a lot of it was benign and affectionate. But it’s the casual way that every single character in the book thinks that older men are obviously destined to hook up with younger women that really felt out of place today. The book is a comedy, and I have a history of missing the point in comedies, so I can believe that perhaps that was something being played for laughs and I just let the point whizz right over my head. But much comedy, and this definitely isn’t the laugh out loud farcical kind, has some kind of seriousness at its heart, and this book is a good insight into the prevailing attitudes of 1971. I’m glad to see that some things have definitely improved since then, even if everything is far from perfect today.

I really enjoyed the book though! There’s three generations of the family featured and we see how they interact, what they think of each other in private and how they treat each other in public. One thing that surprised me when I started thinking about how old everyone in the book would be now was realising how young all the characters were. It’s mentioned that Eleanor was in her late teens when the couple met and married, which makes them unlikely to be much beyond their mid forties in the book, I’d say that was hardly decrepit by modern standards but perhaps I’m just showing my own age!

It was a good thought provoking and entertaining read and I’ll have my eye out for other books being republished in this same series by the British Library.