I'm still not sure what I think of this. It took me ages to get into it, but then when I did, I wanted to keep reading and find out what had happened. And yet, at the end, I still wasn't sure what I thought. Odd. Not as satisfying as the big old family novels like the Cazalets, but more substantial than a normal saga. Strange.

My latest obsession, author-wise, is Rumer Godden. I read China Court: The Hours of a Country House in a buddy read with my lovely friend, Megan, who introduced me to Rumer Godden originally by posting her amazing review of The Greengage Summer.

Set in Cornwall, the land of Daphne du Maurier and Ross Poldark, China Court is a novel about five generations of the Quin family and the house they live in. I have never known anyone, except Charles Dickens, who could make a building such a major character in a novel. China Court is, itself, alive; teeming with the history of all it has seen and heard over the years.

As she did in A Fugue in Time, Godden manages to tell the story of all five generations simultaneously, and she does it with such aplomb that there is no confusion, no interruption to the flow of the plot, and a satisfying conviction that you know each and every one of the characters well.

I have been happy in food,’ Mrs Quin is able to say. 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 Christian Andersen, and the Psalms, Jane Austen, a few other novels. Helped by those things, life reasserts itself, as it must, even when one knows one will be stricken again: Tracy, Stace, Borowis, those are her private deepest names.

We meet them as names, we come to know them as individuals.

Her descriptions are often mesmerizing as she weaves a picture of the gardens, the grounds and the house itself. There is such a sense of place.

Home, too, is in the sight of curtains opened every morning, drawn at evening; in the light through windowpanes; light on polished doorknobs, on the letter box and knocker; it is in cuttings and seed-plots in the garden, and in cats. The China Court cats inherit, one after the other, the sunny windowsill outside the morning room. In spring, the bed below it is planted with wallflowers; the cats lie there half drugged by the heavy sweetness.

The generations are tied together through Mrs. Quin, the current occupant of the house. We look back to her youth, when she is Ripsie, a straggly waif who comes and goes, befriended by the Quin boys and barely tolerated by their mother, Lady Patrick. We also meet her granddaughter, Tracy, displaced by the divorce of her parents and wishing only to have the permanence of “home” that she feels with her grandmother at China Court.

‘Then, is being young wanting what you haven’t?’ asks old Mrs Quin. ‘And being old, accepting what you haven’t? Oh, just for once,’ she cries, ‘I should like to make it come true for somebody young, while they are young,’ but, ‘Crying for the moon,’ Polly would have said and, almost always, ‘Want must be your master,’ says Polly.

Mrs. Quin–Ripsie–is a totally unforgettable character, but not the only one found between the pages of this novel.

For me, the other unforgettable character in this novel is Eliza Quin, a woman trapped by society in a role she resents, but too clever and passionate to fade into the wallpaper as she is expected to do. How she manages to make a life when she has been denied everything necessary to the enrichment of her soul is one of the magical secrets the novel reveals.

Of course, a family of this size and a house of this size do not exist without the staff to keep them running smoothly. One might think that secondary, but even the servants are real and fleshed out and the contrast between the family and the staff adds to our understanding of these lives.

Bursts of laughter sometimes come through the baize door at the end of the passage, bursts instantly hushed; they cannot quite be hushed because the kitchen wing teems with a heady life of talk, gossips, quarrels, laughter. On the house side of the door is silence.

It seems important to me that Ripsie straddles the bridge between the classes–she begins with the servants, barred from entering the house through the front door and never allowed on the front staircase, and she progresses to being the sole master of the house and the servants who remain.

Rumer Godden knows people, inside and out, and she knows what it is to not have choices, to make poor choices, to want what you cannot have, and to love and have that love ignored or rejected. She knows that money is not the answer, and that people can be lonely, even when they are with others.

Homes must know a certain loneliness because all humans are lonely, shut away from one another, even in the act of talking, of loving.

I have found so far that Rumer Godden, even when treating much the same subjects, writes vastly different books. I have not come across a more versatile or skilled writer. It would have been a major accomplishment to have written one such book; I have now read four of them. I am a bit in awe of her and very, very happy that I have many more of her books yet to enjoy.

Loved this book! The layering of time in the only constant, the house, is beautifully done. I especially appreciate that she used the present tense for the past and past tense for the present, tying the multiple generations of the sprawling family together firmly. Their secrets are revealed with a light hand, while the house has its own secrets and surprises. I'm only amazed that I never read it before. Thank you, $1.99 Kindle!

Ugh. Love this author. Hate this book. Gave up after about 50 pages.

Another story about a house! I saw this rated pretty highly on a Goodreads friend's shelf, and since we have very similar tastes, I picked it up. I wasn't disappointed. The story follows five generations of the Quin family. One reason I enjoyed this book immensely was because the female Quins weren't just written out once they grew up.

So Eustace and Adza marry and have several children, who provided the most interesting characters for the book. The next generation is mostly come down from just one branch and represented in the present time. The final link in the chain is Tracy, who is obsessed with the house. China Court is not a mansion and is unconnected with any of those large estates. It, however, has a farm, which is given over to an outcast member of the other big family in the area.

The story starts off with Ripsie Quin dying. From there, the author takes us on a long journey of the house and its inhabitants over several decades. But the narrative is in no way chronological. Godden not just plays around with the timelines, she also jumps around with the characters. It is a very hard book to read and I was heartily bored at the beginning. I am glad that I stuck with it, though. Once I got used to the writing style, I was able to follow the story and the characters quite well, and was able to enjoy the book.

The story revolves around Ripsie, a village girl, enamoured by the house and its boys, especially the elder one. She is not accepted by the family and is forced to meet the boys only out of the house. When they grow up, they are naturally expected to marry one of their kind. The elder complies, but the younger, having been in love with Ripsie all his life, marries her. They have children, who are depicted but not really represented in the story. Her grandchild, Tracy, is however another character on which the story revolves.

Ripsie is by far the most uninteresting character in the book, only outdone by her granddaughter, Tracy. Tracy is the epitome of boring and uninteresting. Frankly, her great aunts decades ago had more spirit and wider interests than this stupid woman. Not only does she attach so much importance to a stupid house, she agrees to the unacceptable conditions of her insufferable grandmother just to keep it. Another annoying character is Peter, who appears to be benign at the beginning, but becomes completely evil by the end, for no reason that I could fathom. The last pages were confusing and added absolutely nothing to the story.

The most intriguing characters were in the middle generation. Eliza, Lady Patrick, Anne, and Jared had fascinating stories. I especially loved Eliza, who suffered harshly from the strictures placed on women, but in the end, found a passion that enabled her to throw off the shackles imposed upon her by society. Lady Patrick had such immense pride that even as a woman, she was able to stand her ground when she was betrayed. Anne was another fascinating character, though I would have enjoyed more of her.

Overall, despite Tracy, Ripsie, and Peter, I enjoyed reading major chunks of the book. It has also left me wanting more of Godden.

I read lots of Rumer Godden back in the day, and absolutely adored this family saga (which takes place in Cornwall, not Wales, as the book description suggests) until a scene very late in the story. I'll refrain from a description to avoid spoilers, but it caught me entirely by surprise, and not in a good way. Until those final pages, Godden shows lots of empathy for her female characters, with clear proto-feminist themes: a woman who's denied an education who turns to book collecting. Another young woman who loves having the freedom to run about the moors and finds herself corralled into marriage with a wealthy, older man. So that last scene, which reflects 19th/20th century thinking about how a man can treat a woman, actually had me gasping in shock.

I enjoyed this book until the unexpected ending which totally spoilt it for me. I enjoyed the unusual way in which it was written, but am now wary about trying any more of this author's works after the way it finished. Perhaps I should re-read it and see if I feel differently, but I very much doubt it. I actually felt cheated after an otherwise pleasant read.

An out-of-date taste, entirely, but delightful in its way, slow-moving, moving in and out of a dozen or so lives in one big house over a century or so, how they're all part of one story in the shape of the house, and the shape of a day, a shape marked by the ceremonies in a Book of Hours. And books are the key to the final happiness, which is a nice, heartwarming touch.

China Court is proof that dysfunctional families are nothing new. It chronicles the lives of several generations of a family that lived in England at the family home called China Court. The title has nothing to do with royalty and is connected to the nearby china clay works that were the source of the family’s fortune.

Godden is a writer who succeeds in weaving faith into her stories without writing moralistic hogwash. An important element in the narrative is The Book of Hours, a Catholic prayer book that is read by Mrs. Quinn, the matriarch of the story. Not only does it fortify her spirit as her life draws to a close, but it brings about an amazing turn of events.

The story opens with the death of Mrs. Quinn. This is followed, of course, by the gathering of the family to hear the reading of the will. But the rest of the book is totally unpredictable. It is not told in a sequential timeline. Instead there is a hopping back and forth between generations, usually through the reflections of Mrs. Quinn. There are satisfying twists. There are scandals. There is much sadness, but as Mrs. Quinn says, “All our happiness is shot through with unhappiness and all of our unhappiness is shot through with happiness.” There are no unalloyed experiences in this life.

Tracy and Peter are key characters in the book. They are the only ones “old-fashioned” enough to want to preserve the decaying family home and its connected run-down farm. The rest of the family just wants the will read, the buildings sold, and the money divided. When the relatives reprimand Tracy for wanting to keep the home, they tell her it will take too much time, money and work. “You won’t have a moment to yourself,” the say. “A moment to do what?” responds Tracy. To her keeping the home would not be a negation of herself but exactly the opposite. Godden wrote: “To keep” had become for Tracy the most important word in the English language. And it isn’t only “possessive” she had defended to herself... It means to “watch over, take care of, maintain”.

This is a lovely book about investing your life in things that matter rather than jumping from experience to new experience. Some take the risk of being out-of-date by giving of themselves to the land, their homes, or their families. The others are “free” but empty.

I read this book to the end but never truly understood it. The author writes in a very confusing way. The story covers five generations, and the stories are all woven together. This makes it hard to separate the characters. When we are reading about a dinner party or a wedding or a dance, the author takes us back through the other dinner parties, weddings and dances that were held for the family. By the time you return to the generation you had begun reading about, you don’t care as much anymore. Every story line gets interrupted with four other generations of story lines and you find yourself wondering who is the hero and who is the heroine? I think that’s what is the most disconcerting about this book; there’s no true main character. Everybody is half developed. You don’t know a lot about anybody. Somehow it held my interest, but I have to say, I’m glad it’s done.

Interesting note; the author has many beautiful sentences and paragraphs describing gardens and homes, etc. Her use of words is indeed lovely. Some of her descriptions I have highlighted here on goodreads. Those parts were good, I just wish the story itself was more cohesive.

It’s so frustrating to be reading a book that you’re loving, and that you think might be one of the best you’ve read all year, only to have an author make a choice in the last few pages that you just hate. How do you review it?

I loved almost everything about this book - it’s beautifully written, and it’s not like any other generational novel I’ve read. Instead of telling the story linearly, Godden weaves back and forth in time, adding more and more details as she goes. The characters, and the house, come vividly to life. And there are some great plot developments you don’t see coming! Unlike some other reviewers, I didn’t find the many characters and changes in time very confusing, although I did consult the family tree.

As other reviewers have said, it was the last few pages that left me upset - I can’t imagine why Godden chose that way to start Peter and Tracy’s marriage, with him slapping her! It seemed harsh and unsettling and there were so many other ways she could have handled it. Perhaps it seemed more acceptable to readers at the time? At any rate, there is so much that was good about the story that I’m still giving it four stars.

Rumer Godden is one of MY authors. She was with me in my childhood with her doll stories, and her very different tales have entertained, and even instructed, me through the years. This is absolutely one of her best books. It is a multi-generational saga with the same type of structure as One Hundred Years of Solitude, but without so much mysticism, symbolism and mystery and with a different kind of magic. It's a bit more accessible to the common man. It's not just the story of people, it is a story of a house and the "stuff" in the house.

I have a very clear old memory of a scene in a book where engagements were announced. I've never been able to remember the book the scene was in , and was amazed to find the scene in China Court a few days ago. Later in the book, there is another scene where a will was being read, and I suddenly knew how that will was going to play out. Clearly, I had read this book before without remembering any of its other parts. I think I must have read China Court as a teenager; most likely, it was one of my parent's Book of the Month Clubs selections that I read without really understanding.

I love this book.