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

Product Information

Now the title extinct and estates entirely dissipated, Temple Alice, after several generations as a dower house (a house intended as the residence of a widow), came to Mummie when her mother died.

In the only explicit reference to sex in the novel, Mrs Brock lashes out with a shaky version of the truth.The book is most often described as a dark comedy and it is indeed very funny at times but mostly it makes the little hair on your back rise and groan with frustration at Aroon's naivety. The mother's neglect combined with the father's gentlemanly behaviour discouraged any true engagement with their children. Molly Keane was in her late seventies when Good Behaviour was first published in 1981 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize ( Midnight’s Children won). Marvelous characters, unlikeable, weak, mean, nearly good, and you can feel the chill in the place, in the relations between people. Keane began writing as a means of making extra money and chose her pseudonym (from a random pub sign) to avoid the approbation of her peers: Women were discouraged from reading books, much less writing them.

Her first taste of social life came at her cousins’ house, where she was sent while a new house was being built near the charred ruins of the old one. Keane’s descriptions of the impecunious rich owed something to her parents’ experience: they had, after all, bought into the Ascendancy just as it was breaking up. A set of maimed and aged siblings (one-eyed, one-handed, and deaf) manage to outlive their own past as it crumbles around them in Time after Time (1983). Aroon and her brother, Hubert, the children of landed gentry, live in a large country house in Ireland. Aroon has had a very sheltered upbringing but she never seems to feel the need to spread her wings, experience more of life, so it is hard to place all the blame of her ignorance on her upbringing.

There’s a battle between the generations, a shadow cast by the First World War, financial difficulties and a persistent worry about inheritance.

There must be many others like this, and I’d like to hear from other GR folks what books they can think of that come to mind regarding this genre – unreliable narrators of a story who tell their side of things and it’s distorted from what really happened. They are realists, who know how to bargain with the monks, traders, middle-class Irish housewives and Travellers who live outside their demesne.She felt shut out by the bond between her parents, and excluded by her mother’s preoccupation with writing. I've put 'good' in inverted commas, because it's behaviour but the 'good' part is certainly in question as we follow their shenanigans playing musical beds, drama with the governess and the neighbours etcetera etcetera all under the 'innocent' eyes of Aroon, born and well bred with the 'stiff upper lip' culture. It is a beautifully written novel with a tense, tight style, complex characterisation and moments of dark, black comedy. J. Farrell and Good Behaviour, which one publisher deemed too “nasty,” and urged her to make it less so.

and young adulthood, during which bosomy Aroon’s physical being is at odds with the aesthetic of the 1920s but she allows herself to have hopes of her brother’s friend, Richard. Although they feared to speak, Papa and Mummie spent more time together; but, far from comforting, they seemed to freeze each other deeper in misery.The reason I like the disaster of others is because they evoke my understanding and sympathy in a way that their successes never do. You have all the right to smile and laugh at the stories but remember that these stories are being used in our daily lives as well and we have to be careful to separate what we are actually seeing from the stories being 'told'. A clever, poisonous novel about largely unclever, poisonous people, a snobbish, financially distressed Anglo-Irish family. Aroon brings up the prettily arranged tray to the patient who lies on the prettily arranged pillows in a prettily redecorated room. In these novels illicit liaisons form part of the plot (though they are rarely central to it), but in Good Behaviour sex and sexual desire is elevated above plot.