Price: £8.99
Publisher: UCLan
Genre: Fiction
Age Range: 14+ Secondary/Adult
Length: 422pp
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A Calamity of Mannerings
Several major elements of the plot are laid down in Joanna Nadin’s first chapter, comprising reflective diary entries by 16-year-old Panther (no, it’s not her real name). She is outraged that in Britain in 1924 the mere possession of a penis guarantees a supremacy which has nothing to do with talent or aptitude. Her anger is provoked because Mama is upstairs giving birth (throughout the chapter, in fact) and she and her sisters, Aster (23) and Marigold (10) urgently need the baby to be a boy; the problem being that their much-loved, unconventional Daddy has ‘gone and died’, run over by a dustcart in Whitehall – Daddy had been in Parliament as a convert to socialism and although he had owned land and property, he’d left very little money. Now, the law requires Mama to produce a male heir if Radley Manor, the Mannerings’ home, is to remain within the immediate family. The baby is a girl.
Panther now wonders whether a shrewd marriage might ease the family’s straitened circumstances. Aster is not remotely interested, and though Panther has tried to prepare herself by reading the passionate bits in The Sheikh several times, she knows very few men at all well, apart from a friend in the village from childhood days. The sisters have idealised notions of masculinity embodied in one or two romantic heroes who survived the Great War, such as ‘that poet’ Sassoon; indeed, Marigold has named her pet ram ‘Siegfried’, though he is neither heroic nor romantic in his demolition of domestic furnishings and any food left around by Cook (Siegfried mostly prefers to live indoors along with a dozen or so of Marigold’s rabbits).
Four daughters living in rural Southern England might well remind some readers of Jane Austen’s novels, and indeed Elizabeth Bennet, Marianne Dashwood, Darcy and Willoughby are mentioned in that opening chapter. Then there’s the arrival in the area of a single man with a good fortune (albeit an American), the new tenant of Radley Manor, the Mannerings having reluctantly decamped to share Grandma’s home in the Dower House. Grandma herself has something of the social certainties and asperity of Lady Catherine de Bourgh about her. As the novel develops, readers might also wonder whether Panther, like Austen’s Emma, has much to learn about men and about herself.
The pleasure for the reader in the first half or more of the book often lies in Panther’s ironic ways of seeing, reflected in her even more ironic ways of telling. The language of her diary is considered and frequently comic – a self-aware voice, seeming to amuse Panther as well as her reader. A couple of expensive parties – the dresses, the dancing, the champagne – offer excitement and even the fulfilment of romance. But a facade of courtesy and respect is shattered for Panther as she becomes the victim of a moment of raw sexual aggression. From that disillusioning moment, the voice in the diary changes; irony and humour disappear as Panther confronts callous arrogance in one she had trusted. But eventually she will look beyond male stereotypes to find a man as thoughtful and questioning as herself; and she also discovers a serious, yet joyful sense of purpose for herself. Readers will know that this will not include acceptance of a society shaped by the dominance of those who happen to be equipped with a penis.