I have just – literally this morning - finished reading Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Love All. It is a book which will live with me for a long time
The story is basically an extended version of Larkin’s This Be The Verse but beautifully done
It tells the stories of a group of English middle class people with their own sense of duty & entitlement, continuing the struggle against loss of status & genteel poverty, (rather as in The Cazalets), & leaves you weeping & angry, but strangely reassured & optimistic
It is set vaguely in the 1960s, partly because of the author’s age, but also for technical reasons: the plot just would not work, or would have to be worked out very differently, in a world of e-mail, mobile phones & Easyjet. Also it would be difficult, in more modern times, to assemble a set of characters whose loves had been so often shattered by death
It is very Austenesh, but with the men’s side more tenderly explored as well. The image of Admiral Connaught coping with a broken down car, the supermarket shopping & a chocolate covered grandchild in a buggy will linger in my mind
It is quite a technical achievement in other ways too – short chapters, 70 of them (is that a coincidence or is the three-score-and-ten deliberate?), mostly from the narrator’s point of view but occasionally slipping into the first person for added power
I do not usually re-read novels I have enjoyed, finding the result more often disappointing than not, but I may re-read this one straight away, just to admire the construction now that I know how it all ends
