I found this a difficult story to follow. There were two difficulties as a reader. First there are a large number of characters spread over many generations, all associated with China Court. To complicate things many characters have 2 names - one an affectionate name as, say, a child and then their adult name so it was easy to get confused with which character was which. This was exacerbated by there being lots of people, over the generations, in the Quinn family and it was not always clear which Quinn was being referred to.

The second difficulty was the style of writing. For example a technique used by the author was to set up a scene then, using one of the characters in the scene, go back in time without any obvious marker that this had happened. So, again, it was not always clear which time period we were in and which characters' experiences were being described.

Notwithstanding my difficulties in following the plot, it WAS a clever novel (although I thought the character Peter acted out of character at the end of the book just to enable the author to complete the story(?)) and I did enjoy following the stories of the characters when I knew who was who, which became clearer through the simple expedient of ploughing through the book! But my honest opinion was that this was a difficult book to follow and the storyline(s) weren't really worth the effort necessary to understanding them. I shall damn the book with faint praise. It was in my estimation 'OK!' and hence worth only 3 stars.

Rumer Godden was born in England in 1907. She grew up in India and returned to England as an adult, dying in Scotland in 1998. It is a mystery to me why I didn’t discover her long ago. As with so many good authors, she was recommended by a literary friend. As she said, Godden’s book China Court (first published in 1960) is the best example of the use of flashbacks in a novel that she has ever read. How I agree. China Court is a big—but not grand—house in Cornwall and this is the story of five generations of the family, including the servants, who lived in it. The story covers a time-span from about the 1830s to 1960. The central character is Mrs. Quin who knew all five generations, beginning when she was a small girl on the outside looking in—and in love with the dashing grandson of the elderly owners. She marries the rather solid brother of the dashing grandson and we get to know the aunts and uncles, her children and finally her granddaughter. Like all good literary fiction, the end of the book is a reflection of the beginning. In fact the beginning and end are both of Mrs. Quin’s death, and in between we are dropped seamlessly in and out of generations of births, marriages, deaths and everything that makes a family a family. The writing is lyrical. “Home is very much in the smell of a house; at China Court the smell is always of smoke, peat and woodsmoke; of flowers, polish, wine and lavender; of wet wool from the outdoor coats, the drab smell of gumboots and galoshes, and earlier, of dubbin rubbed into gaiters; and of gun oil and of paraffin for the lamps. On Mondays the prevailing smell is of soap and water, boiling and steam; on Wednesdays of baking. That is perhaps the best smell; when the bread-oven door is opened, the scent of hot loaves fills all the house.” (p46). For Mrs. Quin memories are often gathered together by like rather than by time or generation; the memory of one marriage blends into another, the telling of one daughter’s rebellion becomes the story of another in another generation. It is masterfully done, so that the passing of time is secondary to the stories and the people; it is as if they are all encompassed by the house simultaneously. How grounding this lovely book is in the contemporary world of moving forward and getting on and throwing out.

I loved this book so much and was already looking forward to a re-read until I got to the last three pages. They were very of their time, I guess, but just frankly awful and now I don't know what to do with this book that I was all prepared to add to my all-time favorites list. So, five stars for 99% of the book, and 1 star for the ending.

n  $1.99 on Kindle today!n

Rating: 3.875* of five

When I was a youngster, my mother had a lot of books from the 1930s to the 1960s on her shelves. I was allowed to roam freely among them, because she said that if I was old enough to want to read something, I should be able to do so.

As one can imagine, the large majority of a mother's bookshelf wasn't all that appealing to a young boy...Taylor Caldwell, Mary Lasswell, Anya Seton, Kathleen Winsor, and Rumer Godden were all well-represented. I called them, collectively, "snoozer biddies." Lots of long-face about loves lost, and noble sacrifices in the name of love, and mothers Doing Their All for Their Children, and blah blah blah blah.

Forty years later, I picked up China Court at the prompting of memory and the LT connection cloud bringing Rumer Godden's name back up to me. I half-remember some plot points, I do remember thinking that the rest of the snoozer biddies shoulda talked to this lady, she knew her onions comes to writin', and this was a good story.

It's a really good story! I think family sagas always appealed to me, and that's why this book snuck past the general opprobrium of youthful disdain heaped on the other books.

Not everyone in this book is likable, in fact most of them are pretty skeevy...motivated by greed, lust, vengeful meanness, thence to do some extraordinarily good things, and some cruel ones too. It reminded me then, and does also now, of my own family.

China Court is a house. It's not some Stately Manor, it's a big, old-fashioned family house. In the early 1960s, big places like this were in a serious period of desuetude in England. This book chronicles the house and the family's intertwined fates at this now-very-distant moment of crisis. It's structured in echo of the Book of Hours that Mrs. Quin, the last nineteenth-century native to live in the house, treasured and apparently read often. A Book of Hours, for the non-Catholic, divides the day into periods of prayer. Most of us have heard the terms "Lauds" and "Prime" (in the non-Amazon sense) and so forth, but these are just words...the idea of them, their purpose, is to give a reverential and spiritual cast to a person's every day and every act.

Speaking as a practicing anti-Christian, I think this is one of the best, most missed, ideas that modernity has rendered obsolete. I think, if this system of spiritual organization were to be reintroduced, the number of people who *actually* understood the religion they profess would rise exponentially, and I am just optimist enough to hope that there would be a corresponding reduction in the amount of loathsome hate-speech emanating from them.

As a narrative force in this novel, I think it's excellent and inspired. I think Rumer Godden deserves the attention of today's readers for her technical talent, her spiritual message, and her ahead-of-the-curve ideas. I recommend this to you.

There was so much to love about this book -- the old English house, called China Court because its owners made their fortune mining the special clay used to produce china -- plus three generations of fascinating family members. Unfortunately most of them led unhappy lives, until the youngest granddaughter makes an appearance. Her parents were divorced and she was taken away at an early age by her mother, but she cherishes her childhood memories of China Court and loves it just as much as does her grandmother, Mrs. Quin.
Like other reviewers, I was shocked at an incident in the final chapter which is definitely NOT acceptable by today's standards, but it didn't ruin the book for me. I especially loved the descriptions of the house, food, clothing, garden, and old books in the library. For me, the trappings of domesticity are always appealing in a novel.

Rumer Godden’s China Court: The Hours of a Country House is a lyrical novel that has one nuanced character—the court (or house) itself. This Cornish estate has been passed through five generations of family members. The main action unfolds over the course of a few days when the matriarch of the family, Mrs. Quin (Ripsie), dies and her children and grandchild are confronted with her surprising will. However, Godden continually flashes back to moments in the lives of past and present family members, moments that give the current happenings depth and perspective. Prominent in this novel are tensions related to class and family loyalty. I appreciated aspects of this novel, particularly the beauty of Godden’s descriptive passages, which engage all senses. That house and all of its surroundings did come alive for me. However, the thinness of most of the characters and poverty of plot left me less than fully engaged, and the ending was off-putting and strange. If you do choose to read China Court (keep in mind that many other readers liked it much better than I did), to avoid perplexity, I urge you to keep in hand a copy of the family tree that appears in the beginning of the novel.

A very enjoyable read. You grow into it--there are so many characters and generations to keep track of. But by the end you know the generations as if they were of your own. I love the way she very carefully and precisely reverses the tenses of the story, and interweaves the tales so they give rise to each other on the spur of a scent or the movement of muslin. Interwoven even into the sentences themselves. The generations are present to and in each other beyond death.

I'm not sure why I'd never read this before a couple of years ago, as I have adored In This House of Brede for years, and China Court is one of the better-known of Godden's other books. It tells the tale of China Court and of the Quin family, over the years they live there. Godden interweaves the past with the present masterfully, with layers upon layers of stories slowly unfolding in tandem; while the present-day sections are told in the past tense, Godden slips into the present tense when she goes back in time, lending past events the immediacy of the present. Although there's necessarily a somewhat large cast of characters, they're richly portrayed as individuals and handled as masterfully as the narrative is.

This book was not what I expected. I enjoyed it to a point but it is written in stream of conscience and jumps around quite a bit as minds do. As a consequence it is a bit hard to keep the many characters straight. Those characters are quite interesting none the less which keeps things moving. As I read I kept thinking of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying which was another book which was difficult for me to follow until "I got it." then it was fun.. Maybe China court needs another read.
Godden was at one point my favorite author so have read and still own a number of her books. I would not rate this one at the top.

I really enjoyed this book. I appreciate Rumer Godden's slow story-telling style. It is like a weaving rather than a downpour. This story has the feel of a fairy tale, which I enjoyed. I also am really enjoying stories centered around place and the way a sense of belonging to a place affects us. In some places it reminded me of Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambertons with that sense of place and family background.

Another excellent novel by Rumer Godden…this one was a bit more difficult to get into. We’re following generations of a family, living in the same house (manor? stately home?), and the narrative meanders back and forth in time. I frequently referred to the family tree on the inside cover, but still struggled to keep track of servants (not listed) and incidental characters. But the story is ultimately satisfying and worth the investment. A nourishing meal of a book.

This is the first book I've ever read by the legendary Rumor Godden, (1907-1998). Godden was a prolific author, with several of her novels becoming movies. The 1947 production of Black Narcissus is most often mentioned.

China Court: The Hours of a Country House is set in Cornwall, and nearly every scene is at China Court, the house built by Eustace Quin for his wife, Adza, and their children, in 1840.

Godden has been hailed a master of subtlety. In fact, the reader is warned to expect that it will take some time to learn who is who and who did what in the five generations of residents at China Court.

What Godden neglects to mention is that she has written a kind of kaleidoscopic fractal saga, where, at any moment, anything that happened at China Court or its family might be discussed or referred to.

With patience one arrives at a breathless moment, past ancient ups and downs, triumphs and tragedies, to what hint at a kind of fairy tale ending. But Reader, be warned by this reviewer:
Fairy tales have diverse endings.