Jocelyn Playfair (1904–1996)

On paper, I should have loved this book, but I didn't. In fact, I didn't like it much at all. Playfair seems to have wanted to write a treatise about war, honour, men, love, etc., rather than a work of fiction. The fiction bits contain some beautifully-written passages, so I wish she'd stuck with that. As it is, this is neither completely fiction nor completely pontification. It's an unsettling combination of the two, and a combination I don't think works very well. I found myself skipping show more over more and more of it as I went along. But it's not only that. I really couldn't warm to Cressida Chance. All the people (particularly the women) around her are clearly flawed - vain, selfish, silly, etc. But she's this perfect beautiful creature who goes around dispensing wisdom like favours. I abhorred her and wished she could have been just a little more human. show less

Set during the Second World War, in England, A House in the Country takes a long, hard look at that war through the eyes of the main protagonist, Cressida Chance. Although the war plays predominantly as a backdrop to the main action of the story, which takes place in the idyllic setting of Brede, it is the reason why the home’s owner, Charles Valery, is not there, why Cressida has taken in a hodge podge of boarders, people with no home of their own otherwise, why Tori, a European exile, is show more holed up writing there and provides the thread of tension throughout the story.

Cressida Chance is very beautiful but, more importantly, she is very kind, with a native wisdom. Her kindness comes from the heart of her, warming men and women alike, in stark contrast to the shallow beauty of Felicity Brent. There are love stories galore in this book, with love and all its permutations being one of the main themes. Cressida is loved by two men in the story, Charles Valery, owner of Brede, and Count Krispori Czepanskow-Ansdal, Tori. Her brother, Rudolph aka Dolphin, has a great but tragic love. John Greenacre learns a good lesson about love. The quiet women at Brede waiting for their husbands to return - or not - are another form of love. Cressida’s love for her son, John, is yet another, while the gardener, Northeast, searching through the rubble of his bombed home for his wife shows us yet another. Playfair takes the idea of love and turns it around like a prism, letting the light shine through her characters to see what colours will come through. Her keen sight doesn't miss much.

It would be too much of a spoiler to give details about what happens with Charles Valery and Tori. Suffice it to say that the ending is not a traditional love story ending, with the realities imposed by war making themselves felt on all concerned. Playfair is questioning society itself, particularly English society, deeply and probingly. She questions the values and mores of the privileged. She looks at the character of the English people through individuals such as Northeast, the gardener. With Cressida in her slacks and joy of eating in the kitchen, she shucks off the trappings of the past and determines a new age.

I was enchanted by the story she told, by the people she created. She told it well, linking everyone together believably and seamlessly. And I admire her tremendously for having the courage and insight to think as she did at the time. When everyone else was in a patriotic fervour, stiff upper lip and there’ll always be an England, Playfair was asking instead ‘why on earth does humanity continue to do this?’. An excellent read, highly recommended. show less

This novel, set in the spring and summer of 1942, tells the stories of several individuals whose lives have been radically altered by war. Cressida Chance has been left in possession of Brede Manor, a beautiful estate in the English countryside. Since so many people have lost their homes due to the war, she offers them refuge at Brede by renting out rooms. The characters who stay at Brede find some solace in their hostess’ kindness, and they share many conversations about how the war is show more changing everything they know. Meanwhile, Cressida herself muses about the consequences of the war and pines for the man she loves, who is currently stranded in a lifeboat somewhere in the Atlantic.

This book’s lovely prose made a big impression on me; it’s absolutely beautifully written with many quotable lines and paragraphs. Ultimately, the novel is quite philosophical in tone, with different characters individually musing about the meaning of life for pages at a time. Normally this would bother me, but I think Playfair handles the intellectual content well. What makes this novel so fascinating is that Playfair wrote it while World War II was still going on; the Allied victory was by no means certain, and she was actually living through a situation similar to the one she describes in the book. For this reason, the characters’ fears and emotions felt very present and believable to me. While the novel doesn’t have a traditionally happy ending, it manages to be uplifting in spite of the suffering it describes. I would definitely recommend this to anyone who wants to get a sense of what the war was really like to someone who lived through it. show less

I have mixed feelings about Jocelyn Playfair’s 1944 novel set in wartime England. Early on in my reading of the book I wondered why the publisher, Persephone, had even decided to give it a second life.

The premise is promising enough: a woman in her thirties (with a young son) whose life was—tragically, according to some—derailed five years earlier by the death of her husband, Simon, is living in Brede, the enchanting manor house of her husband’s best friend, Charles Valery. It’s show more 1942 and Cressida Chance is making do by providing room and board to a somewhat motley crew of characters, people of different backgrounds and classes, most of them displaced by war. Cressida’s handsome younger brother, Rudolph “Dolphin” Standing, and their aunt, Jessica Ambleside, a slightly irascible Austenesque creation who’s come to Brede from London for a change of air, also figure in the narrative.

Only a couple of Playfair’s characters emerge with any clarity. Two of the males appear to be mouthpieces for the author’s opinions about war, which are inelegantly forced into a novel mainly concerned with romantic relationships. Playfair seems to have been a strong-minded, unconventional woman who could not help but air her views. The insertion of those views into the book turns what might otherwise be dismissed as women’s fiction into a not-entirely-successful novel of ideas and literary seriousness. While not exactly “types”, many of Playfair’s characters are caricatures, none more so than the monkey-faced little European count, Tori. He’s somehow made his way from an unidentified country (possibly Poland) to England. The reader is asked to believe he’s been smuggled out of a concentration camp and that he’s recuperating at Brede before heroically returning to his homeland on a “dangerous mission”, the details of which Playfair can’t be bothered to provide. Not surprisingly, Tori idolizes Cressida, who (the reader is regularly reminded) happens to be a woman of extraordinary beauty and kindness, attractive to men, yet arousing not a single iota of jealousy in women. Tori showers Cressida with affection, praise, and . . . lengthy spiritually instructive lectures intended to illuminate his beloved on the real roots of war. According to him, war is the externalization of the conflict between kindness and cruelty that rages within every human heart. With bated breath, Cressida hangs onto every one of the aristocratic windbag’s impassioned words. For the reader, who is much less virtuous than dear Cressida, the monologues are a trial to be endured.

The conflict in the novel arises from Playfair’s idiosyncratic reworking of “the marriage plot”—the presentation of a youngish woman who must choose between suitors. (It’s the backbone of several Victorian novels, including several by Thomas Hardy). Playfair does something rather different with it. While Cressida’s conflict of the heart eventually includes Tori, the romantic tension initially arises from her love for Brede’s owner, Charles Valery, who disappeared after Simon’s death. Playfair drops crumbs throughout the novel about how Cressida came to live at Brede and what really happened to Simon, including Charles’s role in the death. The two men argued over Cressida while riding in a car. The car crashed, and Charles alone survived. No great loss. Cressida discovered that any love she once had for her spoiled rich-boy husband, handsome as he was, had evaporated anyway.

Playfair provides occasional shifts in point of view—from Cressida’s to that of the man she loves. We learn early on that Charles’s ship, part of a trans-Atlantic convoy, has been torpedoed, that he is the sole survivor of the wreck, and that he’s managed to get himself into the most well-equipped lifeboat you could possibly imagine. Sure there’s the dead body of an acquaintance that has to be disposed of, and there are a few inches of water that must be bailed out of the boat’s bottom, but—not to worry—our hero isn’t too diminished to do the heavy lifting and there’s a dipper handy to remove the excess water. There are also canisters of food and water . . . and even superior navigational charts! Under such circumstances, with the sea “spread around him like a sheet of winking sapphires,” what better use of unplanned downtime for a shipwreck survivor—a “tiny ugly blot, left by carelessness on an otherwise superb arrangement of colour”—than to nobly and philosophically contemplate his existence, and, like Tori, consider the aims and significance of war. Forget such lowly pursuits as actually struggling to survive or get oneself noticed and rescued by a boat or plane. Those challenges don’t come into play until day 14, well after Charles has ironed out his philosophy that war is due to men’s failing to think for themselves, their desire to protect what they see as rightly theirs (regardless of how that impacts the rest of world), and their failure to regard humanity as one.

There are some surprises in how Playfair’s novel ends. Ultimately, the author entirely—but not fully convincingly—subverts the marriage plot. Her two main male characters become warriors, but not in the conventional sense. Both are invested in the idea of taking personal action that will begin to change humanity’s course so that war no longer occurs. As for Cressida: she carries on at Brede, free of some of the traditional constraints on women, contributing in her own way to the making of a new world.

Rating: a solid enough 3.5, which I unfortunately cannot bring myself to round up. show less