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She must have noticed my bosoms, swinging like jelly bags, bouncing from side to side; without words she conveyed the impression of what she had seen as unseemly- the Fat Lady in the peepshow. This gap between the false surface and the dark thrust of tragic reality is why the narrator – and indeed the whole family – relies upon the ‘good behaviour’ of the title. When a tragedy occurs, everyone does their best to behave perfectly – to see who can cry the least, never mention it, ignore it and return to gardening or reading the Tatler. By forcing themselves to live in the surface, they try to make the surface cover up and suppress the underlying tragedy. Kierstead, Mary D. (13 October 1986). "Profiles: A great old breakerawayer". The New Yorker. Vol.62, no.34. pp.97–112. Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour presents a character whose own strict Christian code wreaks havoc on all those around her. Though she herself tells the tale, we somehow see her morality’s disastrous consequences. Hilarious and sinister.” I am again in the darkness of the nursery, the curtains drawn against the winter morning outside. Nannie is dragging on her corsets under her great nightdress. Baby Hubert is walking up and down his cot in a dirty nightdress. The nursery maid is pouring paraffin on a sulky nursery fire. I fix my eyes on the strip of morning light where wooden rings join curtains to curtain pole and think about my bantams . . . Even then I knew to ignore things. I knew how to behave.
This review is from Diana Athill. She was an editor for the publisher Andre Deutsch, and she was responsible for approving that the publishing house accept and publish the book…this is at the end of a review of the book written by Athill: “Not long before she died in 1996, when guiding a pen over paper had become difficult, she wrote me a little goodbye letter. In it she thanked me for publishing Good Behaviour, with the most emphatic declaration of how much it had meant to her – how it had given her a new life. It was a deeply sad letter, being such a clear indication that the end was near, but it was also a wonderfully generous gift. I am not a letter-keeper. But nothing would have made me throw that one away.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/201... Good Behaviour includes very little good behavior, featuring instead delicious and deleterious accounts of illicit sex and wild high jinks, and a mother-daughter duo who can scrap with the best of them.Daddy serves as a lord of the decaying manor figure. As long as there are horses, and money to keep those up, it's all good. He'd probably be called a sexual compulsive today, but as long as Mummy doesn't have to Do It, again it's all good. The Dead nanny who hovers over the story underscores all that. Diana Athill: Bad Behaviour is so clever, it’s mind-blowing…There are moments when the reader pauses to congratulate him or herself for being astute enough to twig what is really going on…It is as though we are seeing events unfold which we can then interpret for ourselves, and the effect of this is much more poignant than explication would be. When Molly Keane’s best-known novel, Good Behaviour (1981), was pipped to the Booker Prize post by Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children she did not much mind. She was ‘ecstatic’ over its success, calling it ‘too extraordinary’. But this extravagant tone was neither archness nor Mitfordian flippancy (although, appropriate to her upbringing, she exhibited a strong, unsnobbish belief in the value of taste). She meant it. Molly Keane (1904–96) never considered herself a writer: ‘It’s all a great surprise to me – if you were to give me some old book of mine I’d read it with great surprise as though I had no connection with it at all.’ Birdie deserves her escape with Walter, a visiting manservant, and just as she is lost to Angel, so are both Angel’s children. Unpredictably, Oliver departs with Julian’s fiancée, Sally. The novel’s dramatic conclusion, when each couple sails away, maroons and unmothers Angel. Julian’s leave-taking stopped me short: ‘You were quite perfect till I was twelve’. She has the wit to counter: ‘I liked you best at two.’
In her teenage years she spent much of her time in the Perry household in Woodruff, County Tipperary. Here she befriended the two children of the house, Sylvia and John Perry. She later collaborated with John in writing a number of plays. Among them was Spring Meeting, directed by John Gielgud in 1938, and one of the hits of the West End that year. She and Gielgud became lifelong friends. [2] Career [ edit ] https://web.archive.org/web/20071011230325/http://www.virago.co.uk/author_results.asp?TAG=&CID=&PGE=&LANG=EN&ref=e2007030614553308&SF1=data&ST1=profile An awkward teen she revels in her brother’s company and his friend Richard. The time the three spend together is the height of her happiness, little realising they too are indulging in ‘good behaviour’ masking an ulterior motive, using her as an alibi. Her self-deception knows no bounds. Molly Keane (20 July 1904 – 22 April 1996), [1] née Mary Nesta Skrine, and who also wrote as M. J. Farrell, was an Irish novelist and playwright. The book was shortlisted for the 1981 Booker Prize which was eventually won by Salman Rushdie with “Midnight’s Children”. Others on shortlist were Ian McEwan (The Comfort of Strangers) and Doris Lessing (The Sirian Experiments). Well, at least some folks had the good sense to put it on the shortlist.Animals, food and her brother are her consolation, her mother rarely responds even when Aroon reports that she thinks her baby brother is dead, she enquires where the staff are. Her father responds and inspires hope. She seeks out his company, a kind word, favour, he seeks comfort elsewhere. The St Charles family are hit by hard and changing times in 1920's Ireland. These are the dying days of Anglo-Irish aristocracy where appearances must be preserved and emotions muted and controlled. Setting is described incredibly well, without laying on excessive detail. My favorite was the night Aroon met a funeral guest at the station. In true farce style, Aroon never actually got to attend the funeral. Interestingly, she does mention that manor's Anglican chapel is only used for christenings, weddings and funerals; no call for services. This entry was posted on September 3, 2012 at 10:49 am and is filed under reading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. It is a finely tuned performance, allowing Aroon, by turns pitiable and laughable, to expose Mummie’s hypocrisy which cannot admit her son Hubert’s homosexuality or her husband’s philandering with the servants and which prefers to ignore debt and progeny in favour of gardening. Yet Mummie, along with many of Molly Keane’s protagonists, is no caricature. She is unremittingly foul to Aroon and compellingly plausible. It all makes for an unsettling read, not knowing who has the strongest grasp on reality – the socially functioning, the serving Irish or perhaps the eccentric and the deluded? Moments hang poised between tragedy and farce. Aroon persuades herself that allowing her beloved Richard to rest his head, fleetingly, on her pendulous bosom is a seduction and to be prized. To Richard, Hubert’s lover, it is to be endured until it becomes ‘a bit hot’ and he flees. From here it only needs a short step to see how, by a cruel kind of natural selection, the breed became extinct.
It might remind us of the story of the Emperor's New Clothes, that too is something dressed as another by the story being told. 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'. On October 20, a new film adaptation of John Williams’s novel Butcher’s Crossing, published by NYRB Classics in 2007, will be released in select movie theaters across the U.S. Directed by Gabe Polsky, the film stars Nicolas Cage as the frontiersman Miller and Fred Hechinger... Our good behaviour went on and on, endless as the days. No one spoke of the pain we were sharing. Our discretion was almost complete. I really wish I had written this book. It’s a tragi-comedy set in Ireland after the First World War. A real work of craftsmanship, where the heroine is also the narrator, yet has no idea what is going on. You read it with mounting horror and hilarity as you begin to grasp her delusion. Type in any changes to the title, synopsis or contributor information using the Radio Times Style Guide for reference.
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Sally Phipps is Keane’s daughter, and, early on, remembers having a conversation with 90-year-old Molly amid the driftwood of her possessions, in Ardmore, County Waterford, Ireland. There was a question in the air (implied, if not directly asked): what had her life amounted to? Presumably, Keane encouraged this biography not only to settle the question, but because she wanted to spur on a daughter she would have known to be a born writer. Phipps was understandably uncertain about the undertaking – this, incredibly, is her first book – whereas Keane’s only fear was that the elder of her two daughters would not be “nasty enough”. Keane went on to suggest the biography be approached as though it were a novel – advice that has been partly, and brilliantly, followed. I have read and re-read Molly Keane more, I think, than any other writer. Nobody else can touch her as a satirist, tragedian, and dissector of human behaviour. I love all her books, but Good Behaviour and Loving and Giving are the ones I return to most.” Information For Writers and Producers of Radio Drama". Archived from the original on 25 September 2005 . Retrieved 16 September 2006. Aroon is so naive, so deluded and so utterly alone. She is written brilliantly and heartbreakingly, a portrait of a woman who life just keeps shitting on. And most of the time she doesn’t even fully realise. I cringed at her cluelessness, her unfounded hope for love with Richard, her belief that they’d been ‘lovers’ after her climbed into bed with her for a minute once and did exactly nothing before leaving her again. It didn’t occur to her that he preferred her brother Hubert. I wanted to cry for her longing for love from her Papa, which came in the tiniest little scraps over her life. Her Mummie was the mother from hell, what chance did Aroon have. And all the while, everyone is so utterly repressed - the necessity of “Good Behaviour” means grief is dealt with by pretending everything is fine, nothing difficult is ever discussed, no true emotions are ever expressed. What an absolute mess the St Charles family is. Keane has set herself a technical challenge. She must make us see all the things that Aroon doesn’t see. . . . There are many moments of brilliant, farcical comedy. . . . Keane’s prose roils with affect denied but persistently, pungently alive.
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