Rumer Godden had a long and prolific writing career, but her centenary last year seemed to pass unmarked. If you are not familiar with her then you have missed one of the few truly great British novelists of the twentieth century.

The River, which was later filmed by Jean Renoir, is a very short and, in parts, sad book, but in many ways typical of Rumer Godden's work: set in India, the main characters children, the theme growing up, and how to be perceived by adults as a person rather than a child. It is hard to think of another writer who can so well convey what it is like to be one of her characters, and who describe scenes and events so vividly. One modern writer she can possibly be compared with is Alexendar McCall Smith - like him she is a writer who always wants to understand why people are the way they are, and who never condemns others. Her writing has a delicacy and subtlety sadly lacking in most modern authors.

This novella creates an unforgettable combination of unique personalities and sublime conversations among them. But centered in all is Harriet. Harriet who is at the cusp of girlhood/womanhood's brink. Her sister, Bea, is a focus but also had, for me, a retreating and nearly spectral aspect toward connections. Her brother is one of the two "littles" (Vickie a round cherub is the other) and this leaves Harriet with a cork tree, her favorite place in a "hole" and knowing that it will all soon change. And far more quickly then she would desire.

There are other main characters, and one who has been core injured in the war. And he looks at Bea and Harriet is jealous of that attention. He is now recuperating in the "Red House" which is used for the assistants in Harriet's father's jute business.

The River, the physical nature of surrounding florid India drips from every leaf and nook of plantings during this Winter season. All is described to a taste, aroma, blinding visual degree. During both the Feast of Lights (Indian) and Christmas (European) - the family has company and happy family times. Yet it leaves Harriet hanging on a brink and her Mother awaiting a new baby in just a few months.

Cycles of life in all of its mixtures. Mixtures of growth and change. Unwanted but eventual as the karma in a fortune telling token of melted foil "game" played at the holiday party.

Innocent of ignorance toward the body also forced to be lost- with the traumatic guilty hurt for a tragedy pushing the growth toward adulthood to burst the bud.

Outstanding for the exact moments of poignancy which are depicted here! And the brilliant throbbing living environment of the gardens hides true reality, of course.

Almost from the first page, I did realize I had read this many, many years ago. And yet went on to read it again. At this age I understand Nan completely. Before, in middle age, I thought her cold and distant.

Rumer Godden writes of her girlhood India during the first half of the 20th century using the same descriptions in similar words and phrases as in her other Indian placed novels. But parts are always added of deeper detail and exchange and turned aspect. So if you read more than 2 or 3, you recognize "home".

I can almost smell the smells of India/Pakistan when I read books like this. She effortlessly conjures up the atmosphere and makes me homesick for the years I lived in Pakistan, a Brit who struggled to get to grips with the culture and loved it despite often not really understanding what was going on and often finding it challenging.She is someone who really seems to express these mixed feelings. She describes the flowers and trees, her attention to detail is great, she comes across as devoted, paying loving attention in her effort to tell stories rooted in the country in which she lived as a child.

read in our Sunday evening book group. A charming memoir of an pre-adolescent girl's discovery of herself and her family. The author certainly captures the feelings that we could remember of our own girlhood. Harriet is a talented writer, but alternates between her adult insights and her child-like emotions: love for her brother who is killed by a cobra sting, and a nostalgic "crush" on the adult male friend, Captain John.

Usually, I love Rumer Godden, so I was surprised how unimpressed I was by this book. I could see what she was trying to do, but it seemed to fail in every way for me. However, my impression may be overshadowed by the handling of the pivotal event in the book, the death of the main character, Harriet’s brother, Bogey by a cobra bite.

Godden admits she never had a brother die in this way and that is painfully obvious to me, as I did have that experience. In fact, I come from a family similar to the one she sets up in the story: two girls, then a boy and then another girl. My brother did not die in childhood, but as a 29-year-old adult, yet it was also by a freak accident, which forever changed our family.

In The River, the implication is that since Harriet knew her brother had found a cobra; she should have told the adults about Bogey’s discovery; they would have acted appropriately, and he would not have died. This presumes her loving, but typically distant parents and/or others would have listened to and believed her, which so many other conversations in the book refute. But even more, where was their supervision of Bogey? Harriet herself attests to Bogey’s constant absence from his daily naptime ritual. Why had no adult in the household observed this or any of the boy’s other behaviors? Why was all the blame for this terrible tragedy laid on the servant gardener and a 12-year-old sister?!

Then after Bogey’s death, Harriet grieves but it is brief affair, as is the grieving of most of the others in the household. This absolutely confounded me. I tried to reconcile this with the times, the country and that Bogey was a child and child mortality was much higher in those days, but still the emphasis was all on blame and little on grief or loss. Before I mention my own experience, I know of a friend who lost a brother in childhood, and she is still haunted by it. She was my main support when Mike died.

My brother would have been 60 this year had he lived, so he has been dead 31 years—longer than he lived. My grief has gone through many stages and at times reverted back. At first it was intense, unreasonable, angry and irrational. Then my thoughts turned alternately dull, sorrowful, achy, blaming and questioning by turns; I rarely knew how I would feel from one day to the next. Eventually resignation set in. I adopted a let’s-get-on-with-things-he’s-gone attitude. Few cared about him like I did, and I only had my fellow grief sufferers to talk with about things. Then one day, I can’t even remember when I saw a light of hope at the end of a very long tunnel and realized that some good things had come from his death, such as my own increased sensitivity and maturity. This was several YEARS after he died; the more I looked, the more I saw. Slowly, gradually and finally, peace with loss began to grow. I love him as much as ever, but he is gone and for whatever reason, it happened. Blaming myself or anyone else will not help or bring him back, however much I may be tempted to play the “What if?” game. Not that I don’t succumb and return to earlier stages from time to time. I do, but I see the futility of it and return to peace.

I asked myself as I read this book, how in the world, could a child—of any age—begin to process much less handle all of those emotions without acting out? Furthermore, Harriet was such an emotional child BEFORE her brother’s death. Yet, Rumer concludes the story quickly and makes the birth of the new baby solve the problem of grief as if it were the magic solution. Normally I do not include personal information in reviews, but in this case, I think the author should have stayed away from what she did not understand. (I was also a new mother at the time of my brother’s death.)

The River seemed a superficial treatment of a very serious subject. Godden would have been better off to write about the river, family relations and everything else and leave the boy’s death out of the book.

I suspect her handling of the injured war hero, Captain John, was also weak, but I have to accept that at face value as I have no experience of it, nor of knowing anyone close who suffered as he did.

loved the film by Renoir. the book is a nice complement

Watch the Renoir film first and I think you will appreciate the book more - this of course is usually the opposite approach but the movie is too beautiful to miss

I did enjoy this book. The writing is stunning and truly evocative of the sights, smells, sounds and colours of india. The story focuses on the liminal zone between childhood and adulthood and the feelings of loss, confusion, joy and pride that this brings to the protagonist. The protagonist, when we get to spend time with her, is true to the feelings and actions of one her age but i feel that she fades and is lost within the very heavy descriptions within the novel. I feel that some of the strength of feeling that i hoped the story would inspire in me was lost as well. That said, i can understand that we couldn't truly know or understand the protagonist as she struggles understanding who she is becoming herself.

I thought the river was quite okay, however there was not much plot. They managed to describe the setting quite well, however they went into it too much. I believe they could have added more plot into the story, as the only big plot point that happened was when Bogie got killed by the snake. Overall, it wasn't a terrible book, but there was ways Godden could have improved it.

Beautifully written story of a young girl on the cusp of growing from girlhood to womanhood. Harriet, a daughter in a European family living in India, has a writer's soul, and she is thoughtful and observant. In the brief span of the book (about a year), she experiences birth, death, love, loneliness, pain and joy while she tries to understand the changes in her body and how differently she is begininng to see the world. She observes the people around her and her own life in the context of the trees, the stars, the river. Simple, yet poignant.

p.169: "Queer, what people can make: the flight of a kite - and poems - and babies. What a funny power - and I too, one day! thought Harriet."

Beautifully written story of life, death, and entry into adolescence.

What it lack in length it more than makes up for in punch. Delightful descriptive passages of a childhood in India rich with smells, sounds and bustle. Powerful insights into the main character of young Harriet her relationship with her siblings and that general bewilderment that comes from growing up and not quite fitting in anywhere, no longer exactly a child but not yet an adult. But having to face very adult decisions whilst still hardly more than a child and the very dreadful lifelong enduring consequences of not getting it right. A careful blend of poignant sorrows yet with an optimistic core as the river of life carries Harriet relentlessly onward. A lovely tribute to the author's own childhood in India. Really enjoyed it.

Sort of 2*-3* - as you'll understand from what I've written below.

I didn’t get on with this novel, ‘tiny and sneakily perfect’ as it may have been for Julie Myserson. I found its narrative technique generated a lack of fluency so I couldn’t follow the story comfortably. Nevertheless, it was affecting enough to make it too difficult to dismiss casually out of hand, and I hope that by writing about it I’ll be able to see its merits more appreciatively.

The story’s focus is Harriet, the pubescent daughter of a jute processor, and her family. The family live in Bengal by a river, and consists of Father, who is not always there; Mother who is always there but who seems to have little to do with her children except at meals and when enforcing the doing of homework; Bea, Harriet’s elder sister, perhaps 14 or 15; Harriet; Bogey, her younger brother whose favourite game is Going-round-the-garden-without-being-seen; and Victoria, her younger sister. There are also Nan, who is, I think, an elderly family nanny; Valerie, Bea’s friend; Ram Prasad, the Indian servant, and, crucially, Captain John.

Captain John is a young man. It is not clear what work he is engaged with in Bengal, nor why he specifically visits Harriet’s family, although he lives in the Red House which is close by. He was injured in the war, tortured in prison camp, and spent a year in hospital during which one leg was amputated ‘at the hip’. He has a heavy prosthetic replacement which makes him walk jerkily, and he is afflicted by shakiness and involuntary spasms. He is presumably, in modern parlance, suffering from PTSD. He seems to enjoy walking round the garden with Bea in particular, which makes Harriet jealous as she wants him to like her best.

Although there is something disconcerting about Captain John’s interest in Bea, nothing comes of it, and Bea finds it bothersome rather than louche or uncomfortably prurient. More often than not he sits quietly, and speaks only when he is spoken to, and responds in general tolerantly to the children from whom he keeps a kind of non-committal though not unaffectionate distance. I thought what he enjoyed was the normality of charmingly innocent family life after his awful war, and, in his wandering round the garden with Bea, who is a burgeoning young woman, the presence of beauty and quietude.

He is at his most sensitive when, towards the end of the novel, he appears one evening to take Harriet for a walk. Harriet has been unintentionally instrumental in her brother’s death, and is openly accused of it by the unkindness of Valerie. She is also keenly and painfully aware of the silence of her own family on the issue. Somehow, Captain John’s understanding and attention and his encouragement of Harriet’s ambitions to be a writer help her to forget her misery. (Certainly, the snippets of writing that Godden invents for Harriet allow us to believe that Captain John is not simply humouring Harriet, thus reinforcing our general sense of his kindly honesty.) Moreover, Harriet, in turn, has an instinctive, if precocious, understanding of Captain John’s pain that she is not old enough to know how to hold back from exhibiting, and the freshness of her sympathy is good for him. One of the recurrent images in the novel is what Harriet regards as her cork tree, in the shade of which she frequently seeks consolation and self-affirmation. At the end of their walk, there is an exchange which shows how compatible Captain John and Harriet are, not to the extent of being soulmates, but certainly simpatico.

‘Hm!’ said Captain John when she had finished [reciting her poem]. ‘You will be a real writer one day, Harriet.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Harriet. ‘I shall be very great and very famous.’
He did not say anything to that and she ran her hand up and down the tree’s smooth bark. The woodpeckers, of course, had gone to bed. ‘Does everyone have one?’ she asked.
‘Have what? A poem?’
‘No, a tree.’
‘Not everyone finds theirs so soon,’ said Captain John. ‘You are lucky, Harriet. That is where I am going,’ he said more firmly. ‘I am going to look for mine.’
A launch, as it passed on the river, gave a mournful little hoot that sounded like an owl. A real owl hooted a minute after.
‘I must go,’ said Captain John....
Captain John smoothed his hair with his hand, smiled once more at Harriet, and went.
‘But... you haven’t said goodbye to me,’ she called, caught unaware in dismay, but he did not answer and limped steadily away until his footsteps died in the distance, and she knew he had reached the Red House.

There are two features of this passage which characterize Godden’s style in this novel. One is her skill in knowing when not to say something, to leave a gap in the narrative for the reader to fill in. Why does Captain John depart so abruptly and without a conventional goodbye? Why does he not look back in response to Harriet’s call? What is it about the river and the passing launch that perhaps prompts Captain John’s decisive ‘I must go’? There are frequent occasions where the text offers the reader – or an actor – the opportunity to supply the unspoken or the unwritten thought, and this is a sign, in my view, of good writing that invites the reader’s imaginative engagement.

The second feature, and the main one that I found disruptive, is evidenced in Harriet’s non-sequitur ‘Does everyone have one?’ Captain John, and the reader, reasonably suppose she is talking about a poem. But no, her mind has skipped on to something else. The narrative spends a great deal of time in Harriet’s stream of consciousness to an extent that I found, narratively, purposeless, and I would switch off and read without attention or would skim and skip. Well, the fact is that Godden is interested in describing the state of mind of her main character, and grasshoppering is one of its characteristics, so it’s not actually without purpose – just a purpose I did not enjoy. Re-reading some passages revealed how good the writing is, but did not overturn my original opinion.

I also found the narrative structured in the same sort of grasshopper way, although it was, basically, conventionally linear and largely followed the progress in the relationship between Bea and Harriet and Captain John, interspersing it with details about incidents in the ongoing life of the family. Sometimes there were passages of extended description, though they occurred in an order determined, I thought, by where Harriet’s focus was at any particular moment. I’m happy to concede that this creates a sense of Harriet’s peculiarly imaginative, flibbertigibbet and receptive mind: nothing escapes her attention or interest, and when it comes into her range of perception it absorbs her. It’s a characteristic neatly established in the opening pages which describe Bea sedulously applying herself to her homework, and Harriet being very successful in not letting her do so at the same time as skimping or ignoring her own. This same passage also introduces the themes of the novel – love and war. This is achieved by Harriet’s having to learn the singular declension of ‘bellum’ and the present tense of ‘amo’. War, of course, is not seen openly, but is ever-present in the form of the damaged Captain John, and love, endearingly, not in terms of romance but the childish need for appreciation and approval.

I can see very well why ‘The River’ is a good piece of writing: the descriptive lushness of the Indian landscape and the late-raj garden where much of the action is set is gorgeous; the dialogue is exact, catching the terse moody adolescence of Bea, the mercurial imaginativeness of Harriet, the boyishness of Bogey, the gentleness and understanding mixed with moments of restrained irritated bluntness of Captain John, the goading unnecessary cruelty of Valerie, and Mother’s determined but awkward, evasive sub-euphemy in delivering to her older daughters the facts of life.

But somehow this novel, is spite of what I’ve said, didn’t quite work for me.

I wonder now if it’s because I had it as a bedside book, and read it rather scrappily and sometimes with that phased-out sense you get just before your partner comes in and finds you reading with your eyes closed.

A second reading might well change my mind.