If you're the kind of person who froths at the mouth whenever you see a beautiful home being torn town to make room for condos, you need to read China Court. It's the story of a young girl's efforts to save her grandmother's home in the Cornish countryside. There's a bit of time travel involved with this book; Godden skips between generations to show everything the home has witnessed over the years. And while this can be confusing, it's a technique that ultimately pays off.

The resolution to this story literally made me gasp -- it's so daring, I loved it! This is among my favorite Rumer Godden books, and considering I love them all, that says a lot.

Another book about a house! Yes, please! Godden is at it again here, with her themes of inappropriate (unexpected?) love, religion, tradition vs. change, and the life of a house. In my mind I see the story told in circles, the recent present circling to the past and then circling back to the current present. I enjoy this presentation of history and backstory, as it doesn’t feel forced or take you out of the story.

SPOILER









I was 100% in love with this book until the last 2 pages. The rather empty cut-out character of Peter suddenly fulfills the little hints that have been dropped about him and he is suddenly demanding and cruel and menacing and overpowering. He jerks Tracy out of childhood dream of China Court and pushes her into being an adult. I did not like it!!!

I quite enjoyed most of this book, with the weaving of the stories of several generations of the same family around the house, China Court, and the mid 20th century when the novel was set. I was however appalled at the ending.

How Rumer Godden could think it acceptable, even romantic, that the new husband should slap his wife on the face to stop her nervous poking at the fire, and then do the strong forceful male thing, crushing her to his manly bosom etc, is beyond me. All very Mills and Boon, and maybe more acceptable back in about 1960 when she wrote the book.

2.5 stars, rounded up to 3 because I enjoyed most of it.

I really liked it even if the final scene left me a little perplexed and it's the only thing that makes the book a little dated. Similar scenes now, with the different sensitivity that we have fortunately acquired, seem out of place in a book like this.
This is a family saga and the character are presented all together and this can be confusing in the beginning but it gets better.
The continuous jumps in the timeline can be followed well and little by little the story of each character is reconstructed in a more interesting way than if the stories had been presented chronologically. In this way it is possible to see the connections between the different stories and how the house of the title was involved in everything.
I especially liked the passages where dialogues are reported, constructed with sentences from different people from different eras, which then make sense as one goes on reading.
I especially liked the storyline about Eliza, which involves books!

Mostly good, liked the dreamy quality of the writing, memories leading to other memories, etc. The characters are flawed (understatement) and we all know someone like Bella and Walter.

But the condition in the will - oof! I was reading in public and audibly said “what the actual f-ck!” loud enough that people stopped what they were doing.

And the last two pages, absolutely killed it for me.

China Court is part of a newly reissued series of Godden’s novels, printed by Virago. This particular novel is dedicated to the famous English poet John Betjeman, and was first published in the early 1960s. It tells the tale of the Quin family, who have been inhabitants of a large house named China Court for several generations.

Tracy Quin, the daughter of a film star, is the youngest member of the Quin family. She has been brought up on various film sets around the world, and has finally tried to put down roots in China Court in Cornwall following the death of her grandmother. The story more or less opens with Tracy and her mother, and then follows other individuals from different generations of the family. Whilst this idea is an interesting one, it has not been written or executed in such a way that renders the story difficult to put down, or even makes it clear.

The Quin family which Tracy descends from is so large – the first generation alone has nine children, for example – that a family tree has been included before the story even begins. Godden has defended her choice of this inclusion in the preface, which states, ‘In real life, when one meets a large family, with all its ramifications of uncles, aunts and cousins, as well as grandfathers and grandmothers, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, their friends, servants, and pet animals, it takes some time to distinguish them; one does not expect to remember straightaway that it is Jane who is married to Bertram, Jack who was born with a club foot, Aunt Margaret who had the unfortunate love affair… China Court is a novel about five generations of a family… I believe if the reader is a little patient – and can bear not to skip – they will soon become distinct and he will have no need to look at the family tree on the frontispiece’.

Sadly, a growing clarification of who is who and the relations between members of the family are nigh on impossible to remember without the aid of the aforementioned family tree, and Godden’s intention falls flat somewhat. So many characters are introduced at one time in places that the family dynamic becomes overly confused. The family tree is invaluable in this respect, but it becomes rather annoying to flip back and forth merely in order to work out who is related to who, and in which way. The introduction of so many people in so short a space renders the novel rather stolid and entirely confusing. The characters blend into one indistinguishable mess. The story is quickly saturated with information about the Quin family, not all of whom are remotely interesting.

The tenses, too, jump around from past to present and back again from one paragraph to the next. There are few breaks between different time periods; rather, Godden has created a continuous narrative which just adds to the confusion. The opening line of the novel is striking: ‘Old Mrs Quin died in her sleep in the early hours of an August morning’. We are then launched straight into the dynamics of the Quin’s country house, which stands in a village which is ‘proudly inbred’. The sense of place which Godden has created works well at times, particularly when her descriptions are lovely – motes of dust ‘glittered and spun in the sun that came through the window’ and ‘A tiny fly whirred in the roses’, for example – and not so well at others. The way in which she describes the geographical position of China Court, for example, is so matter-of-fact that it reads like a piece of journalistic non-fiction. Dialects have been used in the speech of some characters in order to better set the scene, and the intended meaning of such chatter is not often easy to translate. The dialogue throughout has not been split up into the form of a conventional literary conversation, and there are often two or three individuals who speak in any one paragraph.

China Court does not have the same charming feel of The Dolls’ House, or the wonderful exuberance and great cast of Thursday’s Children. The execution of this story is wholly disappointing, and whilst the plot and general idea of following several generations who are intrinsically linked to one another is an interesting one, it has not been carried out in the best of ways. In consequence, it is rather difficult for a reader of China Court to muster that patience which Godden urges us to have.

I really enjoyed this novel of life in an English country house throughout five generations. Although the characters at first were confusing (the author jumps around with time periods and you have to keep your head together while reading), I became enamored of the main character, Ripsie, pretty quickly.

Ripsie is a young 'waif', a poor village child who cannot stop gazing in through the gates of China House. Soon she becomes playmates with the children who live there, although the class distinctions for the time period don't make it easy for her. We follow her story as she grows up, marries one of the sons of the house, and has her own children. In between Ripsie's experiences are scattered vignettes (that the reader eventually pieces together) of the forebears who have lived in China House, English village customs (and gardens! the descriptions of the countryside are wonderful).

I loved the author's talent for prose. "Even when one is stricken, much remains; often creature things: drinking good tea from a thin porcelain cup; hot baths; the smell of a wood fire, the warmth of firelight and candlelight. The sound of a stream can be consolation, thinks Mrs. Quin, or the shape of a tree; even stricken, she can enjoy those...How ridiculous to find consolation in food, but it is true and when one is taking those first steps back, bruised and wounded, one can read certain books: Hans Andersen, and the Psalms, Jane Austen, a few other novels. Helped by those things, life reasserts itself, as it must..."

When Mrs. Quin (Ripsie), dies, her will is full of surprises and the family reactions are priceless. This section in my opinion, 'crowns' the story. The author cleverly weaves a story of past generations and their actions that ultimately affect future generations, in an intriguing and unforgettable novel.

BOTTOM LINE: Excellent family saga novel, with the various eras all mixed together, at first disconcerting but ultimately absorbing. Wonderful stuff, very old-fashioned and rather sweetly predictable.

There's enough family history in this one medium-sized novel (304 pages) to compare it favorably with others in the genre that are gorgeous multi-book reads albeit enormously longer (i.e., Forsyte Saga, Jalna series). Ostensibly it concerns the matriarch of an upper-middle-class British family and her fortunes over almost a 100 years (~1860-1940) although the majority of the story centers around the matriarch's death in 1939 and her peculiar will. As the story gradually (VERY gradually...) unfolds, we are allowed to experience both the old lady's last days on earth and her childhood and young adulthood around the estate and the local village.

The characters are extremely well-drawn, and although the young grandaughter seems quite wimpy now, in 1940 her behaviors would likely have seemed quite "usual", at least for a certain class and upbringing. Yes, there's a hero, and also several not so heroic young men, but the center of the novel is Ripsie, the young village outcast who becomes the matriarch of a rambunctious family line and, eventually, the irascible old lady at the center of the will disputes that power the ending of the story. Recommended.

In this 1960 novel Godden tells the story of 5 generations of the Quin family during the 120-year period they resided at their Cornwall estate. The events of the story occur at the estate, called China Court, where the family operates a farm, quarry and china-clay works.

The story’s initial and primary setting is contemporary to when it was written. However, Godden returns to the technique she used back in 1946’s A Fugue in Time (AFIT) and tells this contemporary story interwoven with stream of consciousness flashbacks to events in the two previous generations of Quin family history.

Godden offers a Family tree where she identifies ‘The Brood’ as a 1st Generation, 2nd Generation and 3rd Generation of Quins, with all three generations having a storyline. Godden adds in Eustace and Adza, the parents of the 1st Generation brood and Tracy, the daughter of a 3rd Generation member, into that generations storyline so that the three storylines involve the 5 generations of the Quin family.

Additionally, each of the three storylines is not confined to one linear timeline either, as each time change may flashback to a different event and child in that generation's storyline. Much of the plot and character development occurs during these flashbacks. The plot involves family and sibling dynamics, two romances and the importance of continuing on with China Court itself.

The two primary protagonists are Ripsie, aka Mrs. Quin, who became a Quin when she married a 2nd Generation male member, and Tracy, the daughter of the only male member of the 3rd Generation. The 1st Generation storyline flips between several members of what is the largest of the generations involved, though it ultimately focuses on son Jared and his wife Lady Patrick, as they provided both members of the 2nd Generation ‘brood.’

The non-linear storytelling gave the plot a wondrously pleasing degree of mystery, expectation and discovery as past events key to understanding present day events are slowly revealed. Godden superbly handles the stream of consciousness-based interweaving time frame. She can shift scenes between timeframes abruptly yet so smoothly that the transitions seemed seamless. Once you get the family members’ names down, it is easy to quickly grasp which time frame is within each shift. I really enjoyed keeping track of the various storylines and often found myself hopefully waiting for the next time shift. The time-flipping style made the plot more fascinating and enjoyable than my usual reading experience.

My appreciation and ease with the time-flipping style was aided by my having read AFIT and knowing what to expect from this novel. I don’t think I would have enjoyed my China Court reading experience as much as I did if I hadn’t had the experience I gained from reading AFIT. I did enjoy China Court more as I thought Godden handled the character development and scene-shifting more deftly and smoothly than in AFIT. I also preferred the Ripsie/Tracy older/younger protagonists in this novel over the similarly situated Lark/Grizel protagonists of AFIT.

China Court also had great pacing. The early section has more ordinary events as the focus is on letting the reader get to know the characters. Then the middle brings some exciting plot events that get the reader anxious for more. The final section, even with the disturbing last few pages, did resolve most of the questions raised in the storylines.

This novel also had me engage in some welcome personal reflection while reading. The story prompted my thoughts to often drift to my own family home of 35 years, which we had built to our specs. Each year I become more and more appreciative of the idea of retaining it rather than ‘going condo,’ to help foster the family bond with our three sons and grandchildren. I know I love spending time in the house I grew up in from 1958, a house that my youngest brother now owns. It still feels like my home too.

A novel that prompts such personal reflection is a truly effective one. When you add in the rewarding and more challenging-than-usual reading experience and a story with attractive protagonists and you have a novel that deserves somewhere between 4 and 5 stars. I spent most of the second half of the book definitely leaning toward 5 stars. But then came the surprising, disappointing and disturbing last few pages.

After reflecting on it for two days, I’ve determined that the book’s ending few pages don’t outweigh the wonderful reading experience of the previous 300+ pages. I rate it as 5 stars. After even further reflection, I now think the ending is a meritorious one as it makes the reader think more deeply about what he had previous read about certain character traits, plot events and contemplate possible prognoses for the future.

I loved this book except for the final two pages. The last scene felt out of place and a bit upsetting after such a beautiful story. I would have given the full five stars if it had ended with the wedding.

Wasn’t sure what to think when I started reading it. The first fifty pages or so were slow going and it took awhile to get use to the constant jumping back and forth between time periods and characters. But well worth it in the end. Great storytelling with interesting characters and realistic portrayal of the various time periods. I really became invested in what would be the final outcome for the main character, China Court itself.
I would certainly read more of this author’s books.

First Godden I've read and it's a stately procession of characters whose lives are inextricably linked with a "great house". Right up to the "shocking" ending, Godden is able to subtly weave her tales of England's class society with verve. The surprise ending ups the ante of what was up to that point in the novel a "mostly" gentle reflection on the status of women in a male dominated culture