Nightingale Wood

Stella Gibbons' first novel, Cold Comfort Farm, is one of those quirky books with a substantial cultish following, and rightly so--it's funny, charming, and tongue-in-check gently mocking of the grand literary tradition.  For years, I've been raving about it but only recently realized that Gibbons wrote other novels as well.

I read one of them, Nightingale Wood, recently, and while it's no Cold Comfort Farm, it was a fun book with a fairly decent message about the silliness of class constraints and the very real human need to find something or someone to love.

My only problem with the novel was that the heroine, Viola, is hard to really warm up to.  There's nothing wrong with her--no violent temper, no fatal flaws--there's just nothing much to her beyond a pretty face and the desire to not be immolated by boredom. 

Viola is a young widow who is left penniless when her husband dies suddenly and she goes to live with his parents and two sisters.  Timeframe is between the World Wars in England, and the husband's family, the Withers, look down on her because she was a shopgirl before she married.  She is also an orphan, and mourns the loss of her father--a lovely man who loved theatre and his daughter and his loss is more devastating to Viola than even the loss of her husband.

Life at the Withers is withering--dull, conventional, prescribed--and only the allure of Victor Sparks, a dashing young man who streaks across Viola's world from time to time keeps her from completely shriveling up.  If you didn't get the naming convention...he is a spark that reingnites Viola back into life.

I really enjoyed how Viola came to find love in the end--it was a sweet, amusing story.  I also enjoyed the other main romantic thread in the novel--that of Tina, one of Viola's sisters-in-law, who also breaks out of the confines of conventional life to find love and worth in the world beyond the class system her parents worship.

Definitely an enjoyable story, and one that makes me curious to read another of Gibbons' other works.

Gone to Earth

At Bob's recommendation for my Shropshire travels later this year, I picked up Gone to Earth
by Mary Webb and have started it.

It's an interesting book--this is definitely the kind of book that Stella Gibbons was mocking with her hilarious Cold Comfort Farm. Not only is the setting Rural and the tone Romantic, but the heroine, Hazel, is somewhat a stock character in that she is a complete Innocent, beautiful and wild. She is Marianne Dashwood's ideal in that she speaks what she feels and she feels from the heart. I'm only about a third of the way through, and Hazel has already eluded a fall from grace (i.e., the kind that Tess Durbyfield and Ruth Hilton, from Gaskell's Ruth, couldn't escape) but I fear that this will turn into a tragedy along the lines of a Hardy story rather than a triumph, like that I loved in Precious Bane also by Mary Webb.

Apart from the basic plot, the novel is also interesting in style and tone. While easy to read and vastly appealing to me, Webb occasionally spills over into purple prose.

The opening itself is enough to make me smile indulgently, and yet I read on...

Small feckless clouds were hurried across the vast untroubled sky-shepherdless futile imponderable-and were torn to fragments on the fangs of the mountains so ending their ephemeral adventures with nothing of their fugitive existence left but a few tears.

And, I can't help but feel that Webb could have edited out some of her similes. At some point, a thing doesn't need to be described as being like something else in order for the reader to get a mental picture of it.

Now for the big news...in googling for information on whether the place names in the book are real, I stumbled across stills for the movie version called The Wild Heart and starring Jennifer Jones. I have got to see whether this is on NetFlix!



This makes me happy. Very happy.