The Wedding Group, The Magician and The Gardener

 

A typically light domestic drama first published in 1968 but set unequivocally in the early sixties. (Later there is a cafe with a jukebox). A large extended family live in claustrophobic isolation in Quane, a place not far from London and surrounded by beech woods. Cressy (short for Cressida) is a naive nineteen year old who is looking to break away. Somehow she manages to get a job in an antiques shop run by the wonderful brother and sister Toby and Alexia. We do not hear enough about them. Both very good looking but happy in their own company.

On the scene is the more mature David, another local still living with his mother Midge, who turns out to be the best of all the characters in the book. Nell Stapleforth "had given up the idea of David as a husband, but liked her dog to get our into the country". It is the relationship between David and Cressy that turns out to be the main thrust of the story. Midge thinks Cressy "too simple, too lazy" and we could add a lot more derogatory comments, particularly about her lack of culinary skills.

David's elderly father hardly appears but his worry about money rings true: "You know what old people are like about touching capital". Elizabeth Taylor's vocabulary and phrasing is truly remarkable, often witty, always interesting. Her prose seems so modern for her time. Words I didn't know included "caryatid", "proselyte", "accidie", "inimical" and "etiolated". The Wedding Group of the title is actually a piece of Wedgwood.

I don't think I have ever read a book like this. Almost a biography, but written as a story. This is a work of enormous dedication and intelligence, or as one critic says "an enormously ambitious book one in which the intimate and momentous are exquisitely balanced" or " a biography in everything but classification and reliability". I knew the name of Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize winning German writer, but that was all. So this was very much new to me. The book lets us into his life in a way that a biography cannot do.

It starts in his teenage years in a prosperous family in Northern Germany ten years before the beginning of the twentieth century. When his father dies, his will proves what a horrible person he had been. The overwhelming legal rights of a husband and how he must have hated his family. In his late teenage years, Thomas is reading and writing poetry and starting to write stories. He puts his family into a novel; "Buddenbrooks" is published when he is 23.

Huge portions of this long book is made up of family life that involves his brother and sister and then when Thomas marries Katia and three children soon arrive. Even Katia's grandmother overcomes her objections to Thomas and that "he represented the new Germany, the one she had been hoping for all her life".

There is one part in this early part of the book that rang a bell. Thomas meets Gustav Mahler and after he dies thinks about him when visiting Venice. I had seen the film "Death in Venice" but never read the book. There is little about how the family managed during the first world war, only that the children are growing disruptive and call their father "The Magician". Erica and Klaus are terribly spoilt and the most awful children you can imagine. The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 follows a series of successful books, but at the same time this co-incides with the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party.

From exile in Switzerland (the family have Jewish roots even if they do not practice their religion) then on to the South of France. A doctorate from Harvard sees Thomas and Katia cross the Atlantic. From the safety of America, he condemns Nazi Germany. There is one superb passage when Thomas meets immigration officials. From the California, the second world war passes them by. Lecture tours are very successful. But relations with their six children are not. His brother is just as bad. They are spiteful in every way, their language derogatory and critical. For me, this is what I will always remember from the book.

I thought the latest book from Salley Vickers was the least successful of all the other five I have read. I came across the author when book club chose "The Cleaner of Chartres". I don't think I was the only one who was disappointed. Two argumentative sisters take on an old mansion in a small village. Like the sisters, the locals are all pretty boring people. Nothing much happens. A nice enough story, undemanding after Colm Toibin's "The Magician". A mention of Rosemary Sutcliffe's "Eagle of the Ninth", the only prize I ever won at school. Elderly Phyllis explains " love is a flexible matter at best". But I did find that my asters are called Michaelmas Daisies.