Good Behaviour: A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick – Booker Prize Gems (Virago Modern Classics)

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Part of the Anglo-Irish diaspora, I grew up not questioning what it meant to be berated as a ‘rip’ or an ‘eejit’ when I had been villainous or wilful, or both. I’ve been down many a ‘boreen’ on either side of the Irish Sea and know that ‘a cup of scald’ is the best remedy when one feels ‘shook’, preferably taken by an ever-burning turf (never peat) fire. English boarding-school, however, instilled in me the niceties of what can and cannot, should and should not be said. So when, as a teenager, I first read Good Behaviour, purely because my grandmother had been a playmate of its author as a girl, I could entirely relate to, even hear, its dextrous linguistic parade, from the politesse of the narrator Aroon’s family – secretive, inhibited and duplicitous overlords – to the verve of the native, serving Irish, conversely just as manipulative of their masters. And it is a marvellous story. Revisiting it nearly thirty years later was a revelation and compelled me to seek out all her other, lesser-known novels in what became an odyssey into a vanished world that, like the best fictional demesnes, exists fully formed and invites exploration. Good Behaviour is an extraordinary book. It is dark and lethal, but deliberately frothed up into something that appears to be comforting and palatable. I suppose it is like that fatal rabbit mousse which Aroon serves to her mother. She must have noticed my bosoms, swinging like jelly bags, bouncing from side to side; without words she conveyed the impression of what she had seen as unseemly- the Fat Lady in the peepshow. The St Charles family are hit by hard and changing times in 1920's Ireland. These are the dying days of Anglo-Irish aristocracy where appearances must be preserved and emotions muted and controlled.

On October 20, a new film adaptation of John Williams’s novel Butcher’s Crossing, published by NYRB Classics in 2007, will be released in select movie theaters across the U.S. Directed by Gabe Polsky, the film stars Nicolas Cage as the frontiersman Miller and Fred Hechinger...Maggie O’Farrell (Jim: so close to her pseudonym!): Nobody else can touch Molly Keane as a satirist, tragedian, and dissector of human behavior.

Molly Keane’s literary career followed an unusual trajectory. She was born, in County Kildare, into a prelapsarian, Anglo-Irish idyll in which beautiful houses and riding to hounds through the bogs of southern Ireland featured large. She recalled ‘a society in which I wanted to get on jolly well. I know that sounds awful but it wasn’t a snob thing at all. To belong to and be accepted in such a society mattered greatly in one’s life.’ At 17, she wrote her first novel, The Knight of Cheerful Countenance (1921), published by Mills & Boon, to supplement her insufficient dress allowance. Good Behaviour includes very little good behavior, featuring instead delicious and deleterious accounts of illicit sex and wild high jinks, and a mother-daughter duo who can scrap with the best of them.A person who refuses to face reality and face life does not just make himself unhappy. It also puts people around it in suffering. Either we, out of love, feel obliged to help her manage her life, or the way she manages her life has a negative impact on those around her. In her teenage years she spent much of her time in the Perry household in Woodruff, County Tipperary. Here she befriended the two children of the house, Sylvia and John Perry. She later collaborated with John in writing a number of plays. Among them was Spring Meeting, directed by John Gielgud in 1938, and one of the hits of the West End that year. She and Gielgud became lifelong friends. [2] Career [ edit ]

Our reading experience was one where we were continually held at arm's length from the main character, and yet there are multiple occasions when we could have been drawn in. Time and again Aroon defies us to feel pity or even empathy. I have read and re-read Molly Keane more, I think, than any other writer. Nobody else can touch her as a satirist, tragedian, and dissector of human behaviour. I love all her books, but Good Behaviour and Loving and Giving are the ones I return to most.” This was an interval in his recovery; later in the year he was to have his wooden leg fitted. In the meantime he must rest, he must eat. He did both, and drank as well, growing every day more irritable and rather fatter. He followed Mummie about the garden at first; he even sat in the studio and watched her painting, after he had absorbed the small amount of racing news in the daily papers. All the time he seemed sadly unoccupied, as indeed he was. He couldn’t ride. He fell into the river when he went fishing. Long afterwards I knew things were on his mind then. Reeking, new, they must have been terrible. He had shot Ollie Reilly as he lay mutilated and dying; when he talked to Rose, Ollie’s death seemed quite enviable, here and gone, out like a light.I definitely seem to have different tastes to the rest of my book club (although that said, most of them didn't like any of the characters in this, either, so maybe we were in sync this time). It might remind us of the story of the Emperor's New Clothes, that too is something dressed as another by the story being told. You have all the right to smile and laugh at the stories but remember that these stories are being used in our daily lives as well and we have to be careful to separate what we are actually seeing from the stories being 'told'. Setting is described incredibly well, without laying on excessive detail. My favorite was the night Aroon met a funeral guest at the station. In true farce style, Aroon never actually got to attend the funeral. Interestingly, she does mention that manor's Anglican chapel is only used for christenings, weddings and funerals; no call for services.

I had time to consider how the punctual observance of the usual importances is the only way to behave at such times as these. And I do know how to behave –believe me, because I know. I have always known. All my life so far have done everything for the best reasons and the most unselfish motives. I have lived for the people dearest to me, and I am at a loss to know why their lives have been at times so perplexingly unhappy.” So why did I finally and despite everything like this book? The fault lies with the great writer Molly Keane: her writing is a marvel of distilled subtleties, of seemingly harmless reflections that say so much. What follows is a believable story of a dysfunctional family. They are part of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy falling into decline after the First War and the Irish Independance wars in the early part of the 20th century - although there is not a single reference to this important political event in Irish history. This gap between the false surface and the dark thrust of tragic reality is why the narrator – and indeed the whole family – relies upon the ‘good behaviour’ of the title. When a tragedy occurs, everyone does their best to behave perfectly – to see who can cry the least, never mention it, ignore it and return to gardening or reading the Tatler. By forcing themselves to live in the surface, they try to make the surface cover up and suppress the underlying tragedy.

The book opens up to the present day of the life of Aroon St. Charles, 57 years of age. Her mother has just died from eating a rabbit mousse. She is deathly allergic to rabbit. Well, she is dead, so I guess the proof is in the pudding…oops, I meant mousse! 😝 Hilary Mantel: I really wish I had written this book. It’s a tragi-comedy set in Ireland after the First World War. A real work of craftsmanship, where the heroine is also the narrator, yet has no idea what is going on. You read it with mounting horror and hilarity as you begin to grasp her delusion. Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth In this disparity between the shiny ‘honeyed’ surface and violent undercurrent, Molly Keane has quite ingeniously pulled off the feat of rendering a gap between what is understood by the narrator and what is understood by the reader. To my mind, this is one of the cleverest things a novelist can do. The writer has to create a blinkered narrator, deliberately limiting their knowledge, while at the same time dropping sufficient hints of the greater truth for the reader to grasp it. It’s a tough balance to get just right – not too obvious, not too obscure.