The Finishing School. Seesaw and Mother's Boy

 

College Sunrise is in Lausanne on the shores of Lake Geneva. Rowland and Nina host a few students from well off families. One of these is seventeen year old Chris who, like Rowland, is writing a novel. Jealousy takes Rowland to an obsessive interest in what Chris is writing. Nina wonders why she married Rowland. "His thesis on the German poet, Rilke, had clinched the deal". But now she has a "built in time limit" for her tolerance of her husband. This is all typical Spark, intelligent, witty, with a genius for seeing the comedy in everyday life.

I nearly gave up early on. Not at all like a normal story from this author. It was all done this done that. A boring family are plunged into a nightmare when their daughter is kidnapped. All been done before. However, when the book turns to the lives of the kidnappers, Jon and Eva, it suddenly gets much, much better. Then by numbers once again describing the kidnap.

I felt the author was much more at home telling us about the relationship between Jon and Eva. There were sections which, on their own, proved once again that Deborah Moggach could write great human drama. Especially in the final quarter. But then the much less interesting thriller stuff gets in the way.

The back cover has the words "A tender, evocative retelling of the life of the poet Charles Causley". It is absolutely not! I was looking for a dramatised biography and something about his poetry. I was sadly disappointed to find the book ends in 1948 when Charles is 30 and just back from his time in the navy. So nothing about his later life, nothing about how he became a famous poet. So this book was sold to me under false pretences.

So what do we get? A story about the fairly boring early life of Charles and his mother Laura. In fact it is Laura's story that predominates later on. I found the jumps in time for each chapter to be confusing. For instance, in 1933 Charles is finishing school at 16 but the next we hear is five years later. Nothing about those crucial times from 16 to 21. We eventually find out about his starting to write and, more interestingly playing piano for a local dance band.

There are better sections such as in 1941 with Laura taking in evacuees and Charles writing, directing and playing the piano for ...... a nativity play. This is just before Charles joins the navy. We get a lot about his sea sickness but not a lot else. While Laura meets Americans based in Launceston before D-Day.

Of course the prose is exemplary and there were the odd marvellous passages hence the upgrade from the one star I was wanting to use. I enjoyed the author's other four books I have read, but felt this had all the hallmarks of the first in a series. As a dramatised biography, I much preferred Colm Toibin's "The Magician" about the life of Thomas Mann.