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I've enjoyed many of Gillian Avery's books for children, but this work of fiction for adults, published in 1980, left me disgruntled.
It opens in the present day with a family on holiday visiting a tiny town on the border between England and Wales. A small accident takes them to the home of a local doctor who, over what seems like the next few days, long-windedly regales the parents with local history from the 1870s. The children are not enthralled, and the boy in particular is far more interested in having a half promised ride on a disused miniature railway in the doctor's garden. This is a framing device to the actual story set, in Victorian times, Gillian Avery's specialty. We're introduced to many characters: Richard Boys Talbot is a vain pompous man who drags his outwardly unprotesting but deeply unwilling family, including his daughter Elizabeth, to his ancestral home in Wales. Sir Jonathan is his cousin, who holds the living in the parish, but is so obsessed with researching the history of the old and storied Talbot family that he is blind to the needs of all in his parish, including his daughter Margaret, who's just left school. "Quarry Duggan" is a wealthy builder and engineer with social pretentions who has a chip on his shoulder because his father was a laborer. The Mortimers are the large family of the bad tempered doctor who lives in the same house where the story opens. The doctor's daughter Lily (called Tiger) is a fierce outspoken girl who wants to become a doctor herself but hasn't told her father yet. Almost the moment he arrives and settles back in the damp and gloomy ancestral court, Richard Boyd Talbot sets in motion a grand scheme to build a branch railway line to the village- even though very few others see a need for it- and generally lives in a world of grandiose dreams of his own righteousness and importance, impervious to the needs or emotions of anyone else. Basically, the book is full of selfish, unpleasant people, and Gillian Avery seems intent on showing that she's a tough honest writer by focusing mostly on them (a tendency towards accentuating the depressing is something that I've noted in many writers of juvenile fiction when they come to write for adults). We are told that a deep friendship springs up between miserable Elizabeth and spirited Tiger (perhaps on the foundation of both of them loathing Elizabeth's father), but we aren't privy to it, only seeing it briefly from the point of view of Margaret, a timid, feeble character, who's infatuated with her older cousin. Most of the story concerns the boondoggle the railway proves to be -- ridiculously expensive to build, barely used, and the cause of the financial ruin of most of the local people who were persuaded by Richard Boys Talbot's force of will to invest in it (this isn't a spoiler because we're told this happens at the beginning). So basically, while it's well-written enough, it's not much fun. Upon starting, I had innocently thought the the "lost railway" would be the charming miniature railway in the doctor's garden, but we're never even told how it came to be built. I suspect it (and by extension, the entire framing story -- which irritatingly, despite going on for several pages at a time, is printed entirely in italics) exists to make a point about how Richard is like a boy playing with a toy railway, not realizing he's damaging actual lives. We do get a glimpse, from the modern day doctor's point of view, of Tiger as a very old woman, and learn something of where her story goes, but Avery takes something that might have been a bright note of happiness in the depressing story and turns it sour too.
I've written at length about this book almost entirely from the slightly irrational sense of duty I often feel when I read something that no one else on goodreads has written anything substantive about, to give any other people who might be curious about the book a sense of it. Duty done! But more duty awaits - this book rather improbably has a sequel, Onlookers, which is waiting for me on my literal shelves. Apparently it's about Margaret's later life. Yay! More about one of the dreariest characters!
It opens in the present day with a family on holiday visiting a tiny town on the border between England and Wales. A small accident takes them to the home of a local doctor who, over what seems like the next few days, long-windedly regales the parents with local history from the 1870s. The children are not enthralled, and the boy in particular is far more interested in having a half promised ride on a disused miniature railway in the doctor's garden. This is a framing device to the actual story set, in Victorian times, Gillian Avery's specialty. We're introduced to many characters: Richard Boys Talbot is a vain pompous man who drags his outwardly unprotesting but deeply unwilling family, including his daughter Elizabeth, to his ancestral home in Wales. Sir Jonathan is his cousin, who holds the living in the parish, but is so obsessed with researching the history of the old and storied Talbot family that he is blind to the needs of all in his parish, including his daughter Margaret, who's just left school. "Quarry Duggan" is a wealthy builder and engineer with social pretentions who has a chip on his shoulder because his father was a laborer. The Mortimers are the large family of the bad tempered doctor who lives in the same house where the story opens. The doctor's daughter Lily (called Tiger) is a fierce outspoken girl who wants to become a doctor herself but hasn't told her father yet. Almost the moment he arrives and settles back in the damp and gloomy ancestral court, Richard Boyd Talbot sets in motion a grand scheme to build a branch railway line to the village- even though very few others see a need for it- and generally lives in a world of grandiose dreams of his own righteousness and importance, impervious to the needs or emotions of anyone else. Basically, the book is full of selfish, unpleasant people, and Gillian Avery seems intent on showing that she's a tough honest writer by focusing mostly on them (a tendency towards accentuating the depressing is something that I've noted in many writers of juvenile fiction when they come to write for adults). We are told that a deep friendship springs up between miserable Elizabeth and spirited Tiger (perhaps on the foundation of both of them loathing Elizabeth's father), but we aren't privy to it, only seeing it briefly from the point of view of Margaret, a timid, feeble character, who's infatuated with her older cousin. Most of the story concerns the boondoggle the railway proves to be -- ridiculously expensive to build, barely used, and the cause of the financial ruin of most of the local people who were persuaded by Richard Boys Talbot's force of will to invest in it (this isn't a spoiler because we're told this happens at the beginning). So basically, while it's well-written enough, it's not much fun. Upon starting, I had innocently thought the the "lost railway" would be the charming miniature railway in the doctor's garden, but we're never even told how it came to be built. I suspect it (and by extension, the entire framing story -- which irritatingly, despite going on for several pages at a time, is printed entirely in italics) exists to make a point about how Richard is like a boy playing with a toy railway, not realizing he's damaging actual lives. We do get a glimpse, from the modern day doctor's point of view, of Tiger as a very old woman, and learn something of where her story goes, but Avery takes something that might have been a bright note of happiness in the depressing story and turns it sour too.
I've written at length about this book almost entirely from the slightly irrational sense of duty I often feel when I read something that no one else on goodreads has written anything substantive about, to give any other people who might be curious about the book a sense of it. Duty done! But more duty awaits - this book rather improbably has a sequel, Onlookers, which is waiting for me on my literal shelves. Apparently it's about Margaret's later life. Yay! More about one of the dreariest characters!
