Good Behaviour: A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick – Booker Prize Gems (Virago Modern Classics)

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Charles, the daughter of one of those families following Irish independence trying to hold onto their gentrified lives while juggling exhausted resources with aplomb and studied disregard. I admired the way Molly Keane was able to ridicule all our human foibles while maintaining a certain sympathy for her characters on the part of the reader. Nothing is ever brought above the level of what is decent, not a flinching emotion not a tear not a raised voice. In 1938 she had met and married Bobbie Keane, a gentleman farmer and keen huntsman, becoming mistress of her own Georgian house and garden near Cappoquin in County Waterford. Aroon is so thrilled to be included by Hubert and Richard and so ignorant of the ways of the wider world that she cannot recognize she’s being used by the two young men.

I must say that the first few pages have put me off - none of the characters are sympathetic, empathetic or kind. In Two Days in Aragon the story of the hat-box baby is refigured: the river is an abortionist’s graveyard ‘where babies’ bones were little and green scattered skeletons on the river bottom’.A cowardly child was a hidden sore, and a child driven to admit hatred of his pony was something of a leper in our society. Ah, Ann Daly was a whack-hand at any business like that, and the river is handy for any little things that you wouldn’t want to be keeping. Following the murder of a British soldier during the Anglo-Irish War, Aunt Dicksie refuses to leave for England with her niece and the children.

The rest of the St Charles clan that also includes the servants hold her in their judge first, see later. Her witty, melancholic books had chronicled their abortions and suicides and affairs, their neglected children and abused elders, their inadmissible loneliness and the shameful, ever-present fear of being killed on a horse. Neglected by her philandering father, despised by her icy mother, used by her charming brother, she pines for love and approval. She quickly eats the short breads and cake slices before her father's pampering cook cum nurse Rose can come back in time (I bet he fucked her a time or two). S.), Good Behaviour and its reissue should by all rights give Keane a renaissance of the kind enjoyed by Barbara Pym.Having said that, I must clarify that the ironic tone of the novel always keeps the reader at a distance from the characters. So utterly did I dislike the story and the characters, I questioned my understanding of the word behaviour, there wasn’t any good behaviour, even when the characters denied their true thoughts and said things to cover them, the behaviour remained appalling. Her career led to collaborations and lasting friendships with John Gielgud and a trio of redoubtable Dames: Margaret Rutherford, Sybil Thorndyke, and Peggy Ashcroft. Brock, as her single reliable source of affection, the young girl lacks the knowledge and experience to interpret what she sees with any accuracy. Charles is making lunch for her difficult, ageing mother, watched over by their cook/housekeeper Rose – with whom Aroon does not get on well.