Category Archives: 20th century Literature

20th century Literature, Amsterdam, Booker Prizewinner, Ian McEwan

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

Read in 1999 Vintage edition
The important thing to remember about this novel, winner of the 1998 Booker prize, is that it is pre-Atonement, pre-On Chesil Beach, even pre-Saturday.  In other words it is not the work of a mature writer at the height of his powers – which I know is not much of an excuse, but it was the best I could come up with. In fact after a few hours of puzzlement – what the heck was he thinking of? – I think I came to understand what McEwan was trying to do here, and I was willing to forgive him.
The plot is flimsy. Molly Lane has died in her forties of an unspecified dementia, (false note struck straight away – everyone would have wanted to know what her illness was, and would have talked about it) and her past lovers assemble to mourn her. The cast includes:
·         George, her present husband, who maliciously prevented people from visiting her, and used her illness as a means of imposing the control on her he was never able to exercise when she was well.
·         Vernon, editor of a mildly left wing broadsheet, who is struggling to take it down market, running stories about conjoined twins instead of chess tournaments
·         Clive, a composer who has been commissioned to write a millennial symphony (we are in the late 1990s). Clive is revealed as a casual plagiarist;
·         Garmody, the Foreign Secretary, who has a range of unpleasant right-wing views. He is a Portillo-like figure (that is the nasty Portillo of the mid 1990’s not the avuncular figure he has become).
Clive and Vernon, long standing friends, casually make a pact to kill one another should either of them become ill in the way Molly did. George finds pictures of Garmody amongst Molly’s possessions that show him cross-dressing.  He sells them to Vernon, who uses them to boost circulation, but falls out with Clive as a result. Meanwhile Clive, on a walking break in the Lake District, sees a woman being attacked, but does not intervene because he wants to work on his composition.
Vernon is sacked, Clive can’t finish his composition, and in a rage they decide to kill one another, which they do while in Amsterdam, using the country’s relaxed laws on euthanasia. The front cover of this edition shows two gentlemen in frock coats and top hats duelling in a wood or forest, with one or two others watching on as seconds, a not so subtle reference to this mutual destruction.
Each character tells their section of the story in the first person, so we don’t see them in their full awfulness immediately – they have little or no insight into their own behaviour. For example when Clive sees the woman attacked he views the incident as little more than a domestic argument, when to the reader it is chillingly, obviously, more than that: “She made a sudden pleading whimpering sound, and Clive knew exactly what he had to do.” (88) He walks away.
McEwan assembles a cast of grotesques, and hurries to dole out suitable outcomes to them all. The implausibility of the ending really needs no elaboration from me, and he came in for a huge amount of criticism – the worst of which was to compare it to the kind of contrivance used by Jeffrey Archer. To a point this is justified – the ending is ridiculous and unbelievable. But I have a theory as to what McEwan was aiming for. It is a mistake to read this as social realism, a psychological study, or a thriller. This was intended as social satire, however clumsily it is executed. In fact the novel I am most strongly reminded of is Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved Ones, which is deliciously dark, and ends, like this, with sudden death. But while Waugh carries it off, McEwan undoubtedly doesn’t. Principally this is due to simple care with the various elements of the plot. Satire is such a difficult art that a near miss – as I believe Amsterdam is – is nevertheless a profound miss. If evidence of this were needed, I think it is significant that while the characters and events of Waugh’s 1930s novel have stayed clearly with me for more than 20 years, I could remember nothing of this novel from a 1999 reading until I read the book this week. McEwan’s themes – the intrusions of the press, injunctions, euthanasia, etc – are still very relevant, so I was surprised at how dated the novel felt.
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20th century Literature, American literature, Book review, John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Of Mice and men – John Steinbeck read in the 2010 New Longman edition
Spoiler alert – this review gives information about what happens at the end of the story. If you don’t want to find out what happens before you have read the book itself, please do not read any further.
I have a theory about “of Mice and Men”….
If George were to be tried for the murder of Lenny, he would be convicted. Everything Steinbeck writes leads us to avoid this judgment. At the end of the novel the murder is portrayed as a kindness. What is interesting to me is how Steinbeck manoeuvres the reader into this position, where we have sympathy for the killer, and empathise with his actions. How does he do this?

Firstly, we are encouraged throughout the story to think of Lennie as an animal – all of the imagery used to describe him focuses on this aspect of his appearance and behaviour. When we first see him he is described as “dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags his paws” (page 19);  later he is said to be “as strong as a bull” (43); and later still he “came as silently as a creeping bear” (140). Bears and bulls are of course dangerous, and frequently killed by man.

The story is set in a world in which it is legitimate for man to destroy animals – for example to avoid unnecessary suffering. We are given two examples if this in the text – the killing of Candy’s dog, and the killing of four of Slim’s puppies. The putting down of Candy’s dog is particularly poignant and telling – Candy is told it is the right thing to do, and the reasons are compelling, but at the same time we can clearly see that it is not a straightforward decision. He is told to shoot the dog in the back of the head, which prefigures Lennie’s death. And of course it is Candy’s gun which is used to kill Lennie, underlining the connection between the two deaths, if such emphasis were needed. So Lennie is little more than an animal, and it is acceptable to put animals down when their owners feel it is appropriate to do so, therefore….

But Lennie isn’t an animal, and killing him is not legitimate.

The case for the defence is that this was a mercy killing. Lennie is about to be shot by Curley, and suffer a slow drawn out death. If this is somehow avoided then he would in likelihood be judicially murdered, or left to rot in a “booby house”. Even in the unlikely event of them escaping sooner or later the inevitable will happen and Lennie will be killed. Best for him to die in a moment of sublime happiness than be butchered.
The problem with this defence is that it is based on a number of false premises, albeit ones that the author has very carefully constructed. Firstly, it assumes the inevitability of Lennie’s death at the hands of the lynch mob. Well Lennie and George have some experience in escaping from mobs before, and the case that capture is inevitable is not made. Secondly, George has some responsibility for them reaching this point. While not directly responsible for Curley’s wife’s death (and how sad that anonymity is, like the other great anonymous character of GCSE fiction, Piggy) George did not do enough to avoid what was a foreseeable conclusion. We are told clearly she is “trouble” and Lennie begs George to leave the ranch – even he can tell things are going to go agley. George is well aware of Lennie’s exceptional strenght, and that he kills animals accidentally, so it didn’t take a leap of imagination to see that Curley’s wife was at risk. George admittedly warns Lennie to stay away from her, but then leaves him unsupervised while he plays ring-toss with the other ranch hands.

Lennie is brain-damaged and disabled, and whatever his crimes did not deserved to be put down like a dumb beast. Across the Atlantic, the Nazis were treating disabled people in pretty much the same way as George does Lennie, weighing their value in the balance and killing those found too much of a burden.

So why, when George kills Lennie, do so many readers see it as nothing less than an act of love, more than a mercy killing, a gift, sending Lennie to the promised land he has no prospect of inheriting on earth? Steinbeck spends the whole book leading us to this point, painting the choices George makes as unavoidable. We are told of their near escape from their previous town, when Lennie scares a young woman, sparking a manhunt. We are told of Lennie’s troubled childhood and George’s charity in taking him on. We see Lennie’s propensity for killing animals accidentally. And George loves Lennie, cares for him as best he can, and doesn’t want him to suffer the painful death Curley threatens.

So which is it – a mercy killing of a dear friend to avoid further suffering, or a cold, callous murder to relieve the burden of caring for a disabled relative? And how are we led to think it is the former, when all the circumstances suggest the latter? And finally, if we can be led into accepting a murder so easily, what else could we accept?
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20th century Literature, Book review, Michael Frayn, Towards the end of the morning

Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn

Read in a Faber and Faber 2005 edition. This is one of Frayn’s early (1967) novels about life in the newspaper industry pre-Wapping. It is an affectionate portrait, which some well observed scenes, but overall it is the slight kind of novel that can slide over your eyes without ever entering your brain. You really get no sense of the highly skilled writer Frayn was to become. The story, such as it is, follows two men in one of the backwaters of an unnamed Fleet Street newspaper, pointlessly churning out unread copy to fill gaps in the paper. Churning is a poor choice of verb actually, because we rarely see them doing any work before going to the pub, and their colleague sleeps extensively, then dies, at his desk, without anyone noticing for some time. His replacement is a charmless character who is never really fleshed out at all. The men are unlovable buffoons, tolerated with a deep sigh by their womenfolk. They have various mildly amusing situations before the novel peters out inconclusively. The comic scenes, such as the freebie holiday one of the newspapermen goes on, are over-extended, and I found them tiresome and unfunny. This has all been done so much better by for example, Kingsley Amis.

Frayn writes in his introduction that “No-one, for some reason, can remember the title I gave it” (the novel). This short essay, written presumably for the re-issue of the novel in 2000 on the back of some of his more successful, contemporary work, is arguably a more interesting portrait of the lost world of Fleet Street than the novel itself. But the reason the title is forgotten is the forgetability of the novel itself. If evidence of this were needed, look at these two book covers:

Spot the difference? The title of the novel!!

Frayn is one of our most interesting writers and probably doesn’t get the recognition he deserves. His craft is infinitely stronger these days, and while I thought Spies was flawed, it is still a great book. Hopefully I will get round to writing about it soon.

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20th century Literature, A Handful of Dust, Book review, Evelyn Waugh

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, 1934

First published in 1934, and read in a gorgeous Penguin Modern Classic Edition.  

Waugh is the great chronicler of mid-war upper class British life, and this is one of his bleakest, blackest novels. This savage, bitter comedy charts the end of a aristocratic marriage. The world the characters inhabit is not the comic, chaotic swirl of events seen in for example Vile Bodies, in which characters are not far from caricatures. Although all Waugh’s novel contain an element of bile, the taste here is particularly bitter – one would imagine the writer had experienced a relationship breakdown or divorce. There is a moment about half way through the novel when tragedy strikes. Even though I had read it before it still struck me with a visceral force, such is the quality of the writing and characterisation.



The title of the novel, in case you weren’t able to place it, is from the Waste Land:

“I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust”
 

When I was taught Eliot at A level I was told I would find, or simply found, the Waste Land impenetrable, but looking back and re-reading it now I find lines like those above chillingly straightforward, even if they are open to many different readings. Here, a handful of dust can either be anything mundane – i.e. fear can be found in the everyday or ordinary, or the phrase can suggest the burial ritual, dust to dust.

 
The ending of the novel disappoints – there is a feeling of not knowing quite how to draw matters to a close, and it lapses almost into absurdity, as if the writer wanted to allow us to dismiss the novel as a straightforward, farcical comedy, rather than the tragedy which dominates the heart of the book.
 
If you haven’t read Waugh before this is probably not the best place to start, not because it is inaccessible – it is a compelling read – but because it is not the most representative of his writing. Try Vile Bodies or the Loved Ones for something less likely to leave you in quiet desperation.

 

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20th century Literature, Books by Nobel Prize Winners, imagery and symbolism, Lord of the Flies, William Golding

Lord of the Flies by William Golding, 1954

Lord of the Flies by William Golding, first published in 1954, read in a Faber edition.
Unless you have not been paying attention for the last 60 years, the plot of Lord of the Flies will be familiar – a group of schoolboys crash land on a tropical island during an unsuccessful evacuation from a nuclear conflict. Without adults or the trappings of civilisation, order quickly breaks down, the little savages emerge, and things go badly for the vulnerable characters, until at the last minute order is restored by the arrival of the British navy.
Golding was a schoolmaster in Salisbury, and a veteran of the Second World War. Lord of the Flies was written at a time when war threatened as the USSR acquired a nuclear capability, and only a short time after the devastation of the Second World War. These experiences and context clearly inform much of the structure and themes of the novel. It can be read as a fairly simple parable – the savage within is only a little beneath the surface of man, and it takes only a slight change in circumstances for him to appear. We are all – those of us with Y chromosomes anyway – one missed meal away from murder. This simple interpretation is usually resisted – it is the fact they are boys alone on the island that leads to anarchy, and the presence of an adult immediately restores order. The contrast with Ballantyne’s Coral island, referenced several times both explicitly and implicitly in the novel, suggests that this is a corrective account of how boys would cope if stranded. But that I think misses the point. The adult world beyond the confines of the island is not a mature civilisation but an equally barbaric place where people are killed on an industrial scale. Instead of war-paint the adults wear uniforms, instead of sharpened sticks carry machine guns. The island is a microcosm of the wider world, not some sort of bizarre social experiment where, stripped of constraint, boys run wild. The Heart of Darkness, explicitly referenced in the novel’s closing lines (“Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart”) is within man, not just boys.
But is “underneath it all we are just savages” a strong enough message to sustain interest and, indeed, justify the book’s persistence on GCSE reading lists, and ultimately Golding’s Nobel prize? the book has its weaknesses. The symbolism is heavy handed – the conch, the pig’s head, etc – and the outcome of the narrative is flagged very early on. Jack is described as being almost mad as early as chapter 3, and as for Piggy’s destination – well probably even the most passive of readers will work out quite early on that things are not going to end well for Piggy. He is portrayed as one of nature’s victims, almost inviting his mistreatment/bullying. When the choir reform as a hunting group, focussed obsessively on killing pigs, the writing is on the wall for our anonymous, if endearing and ultimately quite brave friend.  
So we need to look elsewhere for material to sustain interest in the novel. You don’t get the Nobel prize for literature by writing adventure stories for children. Golding is a mature writer, even in this, his first novel, and his technique is complex. For example, he does something very sophisticated with his narrational point of view. He uses a third person narrator but gives them a limited perspective. It is not quite as simple as this being the viewpoint of the boys, although little is explained other than what is immediately obvious to the protagonists. So we are not told directly how they came to be on the island, why there are no adults (or girls!), and are left to deduce a lot of the backstory – the conflict, the evacuation, etc – from snippets of dialogue. The reader is given just enough information to understand that many of the boy’s observations about their circumstances are wrong – for example that the beast is not an actual creature. (And by the way, another obvious source for Lost here – or are there simply no tropical islands on which people are stranded by way of an air crash that are not haunted by strange creatures?). The narrator only occasionally tells us more about the island than the boys would know – one example is the scene where the plane fight in the night sky is described, and the dead parachutist lands on the island. At other times the scene comes closer to the boy’s perspective, such as the chilling scene where the Lord of the Flies speaks to Simon through the decapitated pig’s head.
This point of view allows us to understand the boys’ feelings as they get used to not having adults around, and as their sense of liberation ebbs away to be replaced by concern, then fear. We understand the lure of the hunters, and why savagery gets the upper hand. It also avoids the necessity of filling in much of the backstory – the reader is left to do the work.
Golding also uses a very rich range of imagery to evoke the island and the events of the story. The narrative uses simile, metaphor, personification, synecdoche and metonymy, as well as when appropriate figures of speech, which robbed from their traditional context are given new life on the island. This imagery flowers when the narrative reaches key points. Thunder is like the “blow of a whip”; pig guts look like a “heap of glistening coal” (160); the night has a “dentist’s chair unreality” (134) flies buzz “like a saw (152); Ralph kneels “like a sprinter at his mark” (155).
The island and elements are personified as a living creature or person – seaweed is like “shining hair” (121) the sea has “fingers of spray” (121) and its swell is “like the breathing of some stupendous creature” (115) and again is described as a “sleeping leviathan” (115); even the air acts as if it is sentient, “pushing2 in from the sea, (160) and “cuffing” the trees (161). The sun doesn’t just beat down, it does so with “enmity” (9). When Simon’s body is carried gently out to sea  it is treated reverently by the tide and the micro-organisms in the sea, as if they are showing him the kindness and respect he did not receive from his peers.
There is one final, telling use of imagery that I wanted to underline. When the children first see the “beast”, in the form of the body of the airman, it is described a sitting asleep “like a great ape”. (135). Jack has already been described (49) as ape-like, and later, when he is in full Mr Kurtz mode, the connection is reinforced: he is described thus: “power lay in the brown swell of his forearms; authority sat on his shoulder and chattered in his ear like an ape” (165). We are left in little doubt as to who the beast really is.

 

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20th century Literature

Sons and Lovers – D.H.Lawrence

DH Lawrence Sons and Lovers, first published 1913.

How can you write about a novel such as Sons and Lovers without the weight of a hundred years of critical evaluation and response bearing down oppressively on you? Where do you start – with one’s own immediate personal reaction, or with some consideration of the novel in the context of its place in 20th century literature?
Lawrence famously was the first novelist to write openly and honestly about sexual relationships between men and women. This is a relatively early work however, and there is still much hesitation in his approach. While people have sexual urges, and subsequently sex, it is described largely through suggestion or inference, the literary equivalent of trains going into tunnels. People are deeply moved, feel their hot blood rising, and objects often stand in as representations of their erotic feelings. For example there is an extraordinary scene where Miriam, one of the lovers of the title, turns her attention to some daffodils thus: “To her (Miriam) flowers appealed with such strength she felt she must make them a part of herself. When she bent and breathed a flower it was as if she and the flower were loving one another. Paul hated her for it.” (Page 155). Not too much room for ambiguity to my jaded 21st century eyes there.

“Miriam went on her knees before one cluster, took a wild looking daffodil between her hands, turned up its face of gold to her, and bowed down, caressing it with her mouth and cheeks and brow. He stood aside with his hands in his pockets, watching her…..fondling them lavishly all the while” (page 198). Which I am sure was nice. Her approach to flowers, which decorate the book like a church in August, is summarised earlier:

People constantly behave in an extremely sexual way while continuing to avoid sex itself eg: 
“She (Miriam again) took her finger from her mouth with a little pop, and looked up at him almost challenging. But still her soul was naked in her great dark eyes, and there was the same yearning appeal upon her.” (page 169).
Or later 
“He (Paul) picked up a stick and began to stab the earth with it….He thrust, thrust, thrust at the ground with the pointed stick, digging up little clods of earth as if he were in a fever of irritation.” (page 200). One last example, when Paul is reading the bible to Miriam:
“She sat back on the sofa away from him, and yet feeling herself the very instrument his hand grasped. It gave her great pleasure.”
When the sex does finally arrive, which I can understand to a pre-Great War audience must surely have been shocking, not to mention titillating, it is usually presenting as the exercise of male lust against passive female acceptance. He conjures an extraordinary phrase to describe “married love” on this basis: “Being the sons of mothers whose husbands had blundered rather brutally through their feminine sanctities”.

If I were to do a word count I am guessing one of the words that would crop up most frequently in this novel is “hate”. An example is cited above, where Paul, the principal son of the title, hates his girlfriend for liking flowers just a bit too much. But people hate others and things at the drop of a hat, and for apparently little or no reason. We can thus conclude that these are people who are moved to deep emotions signified by their quivering breasts and moody silences. Stella Gibbons parodies this all wonderfully in Cold Comfort farm of course, especially through the character of Cousin Judith, and Seth and his mollocking. And delightfully there is also a Miriam in CCF who bears the fruit of too much blundering through her feminine sanctities.
The handling of the Oedipal relationship between Paul and his mother, Gertrude to remind us of Hamlet’s problems with women no doubt, reminded me of Seth’s comments to Flora that he won’t let women eat him:
“She wants to absorb him. She wants to draw him out and absorb him till there is nothing left of him, even for himself. He will never be a man on his own feet – she will suck him up”. (As Larkin almost said, they suck you up, your mum and dad). (Page 173)

So what is missing from the novel? Well a plot would have been nice, or incidents that appeared connected to the lives of the characters. An ending would have rounded it off. I would have been interested in a description of the mines where Paul’s father works, with perhaps with a bit less about the surgical appliance factory. A believable female character that didn’t swoon over Paul, give in to his sexual desires without any of her own, and then walk away. Oh, and some indication that the world as described was going to come to an abrupt end 12 months later. (To be fair there is a very fleeting reference to the German attitude to war, and Paul’s younger brother, Arthur does join the army, but these hardly give you a feel for a country on the brink of war, and massive social change).
Would I read more Lawrence – I think I have to don’t I?
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20th century Literature

Westwood – Stella Gibbons

“If Cold Comfort Farm is Stella Gibbon’s Pride and Prejudice, then Westwood is her Persuasion,” says Lynne Truss, in her introduction. The observation is acute. It is intended as a positive comment, but I am not sure it does Gibbons or Westwood any favours – Persuasion is a book it is hard to love, the characters being largely unengaging and unsympathetic, all the more so when contrasted with the earlier work which inspires such devotion. Once the first bright flare of Cold Comfort farm had faded away, what was Gibbons to do –  keep silent like Harper Lee, or earn a modest living churning out uninspired and uninspiring stories that have dated horribly and never hint at the heights of achievement CCF achieved. There is some amusement in spotting traces of the DNA of Mr Mybug in the characterisation of Gerard Challis, the pompous and horny playwright gleefully exposed to his family as a “cad”, but the principal character, Margaret Steggles, is just the kind of self absorbed young woman whom Flora would have kindly said “yes dear” to and then got away from as quickly as possible. Her dilemma – of being a young, clever, but plain young women in a world where men are in short supply, and likely to continue thus, is one women of the time would be identified with, but today makes us just sigh with relief. Some reviewers have claimed that the description of a post blitz London provides some interest – Westwood was published in 1946, and the story takes place in London just after the Blitz; – but this is not enough to support the interest of a 21st century reader.

I quite understand the idea of mining the Gibbons back-catalogue – Vintage must have done quite well out of it, and have done the job respectfully, assembling some nicely designed editions with thoughtful introductions. But I can’t resist the thought that once the flurry of interest has died away these books will fade back out of print until the next rediscovery.

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20th century Literature, Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons

Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons, 1940

OK, last entry on Cold Comfort for now,although to be fair it has been an obsession for more years than I care to remember, and this writing has a certain cathartic/therapeutic role. “Christmas” it needs to be said straight away is a short story – not even that really, more a portrait. It runs to less than 20 pages in the Vintage edition recently published, and bless them for doing so. I can forgive the fact they do little to publicise the fact that this is not a novel, but a collection of stories, only one of which is about Cold Comfort.

The original novel was published in 1932; this short story dates from 1940, and Conference, which I wrote about earlier in the month dates to 1959, astonishingly late given the subjects being satirised. But I have written enough about Conference, save to say that the glimpse we have of Elfine, out riding with her sons, is worth the book on its own. Back to Christmas. Gibbons rediscovers her light comic touch here, and the vision of a Cold Comfort unredeemed by Flora’s reformation, anarchic and dark, is to be treasured. Adam Lambsbreath delivers presents to the clan, disturbing Seth with a “friend” and being shot at by Amos with the goat-gun in the process, and then Christmas dinner degenerates into predictable anarchy. Elfine escapes with Dick on horseback, and the farm settles back into its long wait for Flora, Aunt Ada flapping weakly at anyone in range of the Milk Producers Weekly Bulletin and Cowkeepers Guide. One word – brilliant.
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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, Book review, Cold Comfort farm, humour, Stella Gibbons

Cold Comfort Farm – a classic

I have a confession to make – I love Cold Comfort Farm so much that I/we named my firstborn after two of the principal characters. I figured this would at least give him a great conversation opener when he finally gets interested in girls.
CCF is in my top three works of fiction of all time. On my desert island it would share a shelf with the Collected Works of Shakespeare, and, oh, probably the Gormenghast trilogy (if I could get away with having a trilogy).
The clichés about CCF are all, sadly, true. Stella Gibbons never wrote another word coming close to its genius, and the introductions to her recently reissued novels by Vintage acknowledge as much. That’s not to say her other work isn’t worth reading, (and I will write separately about Conference at Cold Comfort Farm, and Christmas at CCF) but you can never for a second forget that they are written by the same person who wrote Cold Comfort Farm. The contrast can be painful.
(this cover illustration is wrong is so many different ways, but is from the first edition I owned)
Anatomising why the novel is such a delight is in some respects pointless – it doesn’t bear too much analysis and inspection. The plot is flimsy, the minor characters deliberately (and joyfully) muddled up, the purple prose is flagged for the reader’s ease of appreciation. But some observations can’t be resisted. The romance between Flora and Charles, drawn with an economy that Austen would be proud of, is a particular delight. At the end of the novel (spoiler alert) they fall into one another’s arms, and are virtually speechless with genuine delight. Another joy is the use of names – Urk and his water voles, Richard Hawk-Monitor the local gentry from Haut-Couture (“Howchicker”) hall, Adam Lambsbreath (Adam has strong echoes of Joseph, the irascible and largely incoherent rustic who haunts Wuthering Heights) and of course, Aunt Ada Doom, matriach of the Starkadders.
The cliche that one could not love someone who did not love (insert cultural artifact of choice) is over-used, but I am so glad that the person I chose to spend my life with loves Cold Comfort as much as I do.
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