Family Saga Historical Novel
PDR Lindsay | June 30, 2009
‘THE CARPENTER’S CHILDREN’ by Maggie Bennett, ALLISON & Busby Ltd., April 2009, £19.99, hb, 352 pages, ISBN:9780749079895.
As a writer-reader I find sagas irritating because I want to delve more deeply into the main character’s personality and motives, but sagas cover the life and adventures of all the family members over long spaces of time, often from childhood to old age. The plot is on a grand scale and thus the writing tends to a lot of telling with far too many characters for a reader to be deeply involved with. I like depth, but a good saga is a corking good story. Maggie Bennett writes some of the best and even manages to include more in depth character studies and motivations as well as a great story.
The carpenter of this saga is Tom Munday and we find him, with wife, Violet and three children, living in the village of North Camp, southern England, in 1904. Violet Munday loves her husband and has ambitions for her children. Ernest, her eldest she hopes will be more than a master tradesman, that he will become a clerk in a bank or solicitor’s office. Isabel, beautiful Isabel, the good and kind child, she hopes will be a teacher. Violet is very class conscious and wants to se eher children rased to the middle classes. Grace, the naughty, hot tempered baby of the family she worries about, but thinks something like nursing might calm her.
As a good saga should we follow the Mundays, their friends and community, through all the radical changes that take place in the early 20th Century, particularly during the onset and years of The Great War. Poor Violet has such problems adapting to the social changes and these historical details are one of Maggie Bennett’s writing strengths. Her research is excellent and used, not as a history lesson, but to show how the social changes affect the characters.
We watch the children grow up. Grace and her friends are deeply influenced by Hollywood films and dream of being ‘discovered’ and becoming film stars. Grace is heading for trouble. Violet has problems discussing sexual matters, is horrified that her daughters learn about sex at school. She never really feels comfortable in the 20th Century. Ernest is bright but religious, he has a terrible time at school and becomes a pacifist. Isabel falls in love when fifteen, but he is a curate and much older.
Tom watches his children grow and struggle, helps when he can, and reaches his own kind of peace in 1919, but without Violet, though his daughters are near him. It’s a cosy ending with the good getting their earthly rewards and the bad receiving their just desserts. That’s what sagas do, provide a comfortable read. This is an excellent book for slow bedtime reading, one chapter a night to cheer you up, in this world gone mad
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