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

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Charles prepares to serve her invalid mother a splendid luncheon—the silver gleams, the linens glow—of rabbit mousse, a dish her mother despises. 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. So when, as a teenager, I first read Good Behaviour, purely because my grandmother had been a playmate of its author as a girl, I could entirely relate to, even hear, its dextrous linguistic parade, from the politesse of the narrator Aroon’s family – secretive, inhibited and duplicitous overlords – to the verve of the native, serving Irish, conversely just as manipulative of their masters.

Some of the houses, shorn of their estates, were bought by wealthy members of the Catholic professional classes, but they depended on business to keep the establishments going, not style. She followed it with Time After Time (1983) and Loving and Giving (1988), written when she was in her 80s. There’s a battle between the generations, a shadow cast by the First World War, financial difficulties and a persistent worry about inheritance. Almost exactly a year later, on 12 April 1981, André Deutsch published Good Behaviour and I don’t think it has been out of print since. But this is a version of Anglo-Irish decline as far as possible from the plangent world of William Trevor, or even Elizabeth Bowen.Virtually uneducated, and by her own account ignored at home, as a young woman Molly effectively found herself a second family with the Perrys of County Tipperary. Her only hope for a love affair is with her brother's best friend, whose real feelings are one of the many mysteries that Aroon cannot understand, although the reader may. I’m not suggesting we should read them as Irish realism, in the mode of John McGahern or Edna O’Brien, but Keane herself makes clear that the baroque world of her fiction, in which sex was transgression and harm could not be acknowledged, was as much a portrait of upper-class England and everyday Ireland as it was of the Anglo-Irish. So there is sex, murder, suicide, pregnancy, masturbation, nannies, class, queer characters and much more.

She grew up at Ballyrankin in County Wexford and was educated at a boarding school in Bray, County Wicklow. The rest of the book beings us back to Aroons’ birth and then moves forward to when she is in her 30s. In case we miss the analogy, he even brokers sex on one occasion by offering a thoroughbred horse to the twins. I n​ Molly Keane: A Life, her biography of her mother from 2017, Sally Phipps records an occasion in the 1920s when a dead baby was found inside a hat box floating down the River Slaney. Keane’s fiction knows this, and knows that for women, sexual violence and the struggles that trail sexual love persisted right up until the 1980s, when Good Behaviour was published, and beyond.

She survives through her alliances with the world outside the Big House, first with Mrs Brock, and later with the local solicitor, Mr Kiely, to whom she demonstrates an utterly pragmatic and unfamilial way with money. G. Farrell’s Troubles(1970), she cast a dispassionate eye over the demise of the Protestant Ascendancy yet dissected it with empathy, often unpredictably.

Our reading experience was one where we were continually held at arm's length from the main character, and yet there are multiple occasions when we could have been drawn in. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Aroon spends her time and energy looking for someone to adopt her, finding a candidate, for a while, in her governess Mrs Brock. M oll y​ Keane’s gloriously camp novel, Good Behaviour, begins with the narrator, Aroon St Charles, a 57-year-old survivor of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, murdering her aged mother with a rabbit mousse. Her father, Walter Clarmont Skrine (died 1930), was from a Somerset family and owned land at Alberta, Canada, and was a fanatic for horses and hunting; her mother, Agnes Shakespeare Higginson (1864–1955), a poet who wrote under the pseudonym Moira O'Neill, was daughter of Charles Henry Higginson (son of James Macaulay Higginson, Governor of British Mauritius from 1851 to 1857), a colonial administrator in Mauritius.I fix my eyes on the strip of morning light where wooden rings join curtains to curtain pole and think about my bantams . Molly Keane allows Aroon (whose Irish name, with perfect irony, means ‘my beloved’) to chronicle the preceding history and, in so doing, chart the self-destructive double-standards which masquerade as good behaviour. Perhaps the perfect time to read it is now, in a global pandemic, when time feels stopped, present and past atrocities knit together on a single stitch.

Her husband died suddenly in 1946, and following the failure of a play she published nothing for twenty years. It bobs along, all hunting, gardening and dancing, but then, just as you begin to sink into the relaxing comfort of this old-fashioned, grand way of life, out thrusts a hideously dark, utterly shocking occurrence.

Keane’s scenes are full of brightly lit and oddly oversized features picked out against highly stylised backgrounds . 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. A narrator in denial; a style purged of description; a plot never spelled out; a love that dares not speak its name.