Susan Gerstein's Blog - Posts Tagged "cazalet-chronicles"
An Intermediary Report on the Cazalet Chronicles
On February 24th I wrote about having re-discovered Elizabeth Jane Howard and embarking on her major work, “The Cazalet Chronicles”. This is a five-volume set of novels written mostly during the 1990s, a family saga of the British upper middle classes before, during and just after the Second World War, taking place mostly in London and its environs. Having read an earlier novel of this author, “Something in Disguise”, that I liked very much, I plunged into the Cazalets with great expectations. I am now nearly at the end of the third of the five volumes and have very mixed feelings about it, one of the odder reading experiences I have had in a while. On the one hand, I have been plunged into the lives of an extended family and have become interested in what happens to them. I have no intention of abandoning their story and will follow it as far as the author will take it. On the other hand, reading it is like being in a warm bath: pleasant but on the whole not a very meaningful experience. It flows, at times oozes, like real life, and takes nearly as long. It is full of all the drama that a large, interconnected group of people is capable of producing: there is love, death, adultery, rape, child molesting, child rebellion, friendship and jealousy. Interestingly enough, very little of it results in confrontations among the characters. Events are presented from different viewpoints by different members of the family, often repeated, Rashomon-like. Many of those events that would each deserve and might receive an entire passionate novel elsewhere here become mere incidents, commented upon and then passed by – and life goes on. As it does, most often, in real life. This understatement has its virtues in a book: it flows along and is restful. I would certainly recommend it to anyone going on a long sea journey and wishing to pass the time in the company of an, on the whole, interesting group of people going about their business at a particular moment in history. The War, as it affects the Cazalets, remains mainly in the background: some of the men are away fighting and we encounter the occasional wounded returning; there are shortages of everything, ingenuity is needed to “cope” with them; there is the need for the blackout and very stiff upper lips about the London blitz. But in the foreground the lives of most of the family and their surroundings go on as before, with the appropriate adjustments.
I have two volumes to go, every intention of finishing it, and hope to comment at the end of the saga. Perhaps it will turn into a whole that will justify the parts.
I have two volumes to go, every intention of finishing it, and hope to comment at the end of the saga. Perhaps it will turn into a whole that will justify the parts.
Elizabeth Jane Howard and the "Cazalet Chronicles", continued
So, I did finish all five volumes, as I said in my March 18th post that I would. Wow, what a project it was! On the whole, the opinion I had about it at the end of the third volume did not change very much by the end of the fifth and last one; it’s just that there is that much more verbiage to deal with, that much more meandering incidents in Cazalet family life to digest. It was fascinating in itself that, in spite of the repetitions, the eye-glazing minutiae of the day-to-day activities among family members, the resentment felt that I was wasting a lot of time, I never considered stopping to read about them. There is a hypnotic quality to the endless drama that never concludes, never comes to a head.
From the first volume on to the end, there is the hard to reconcile contradiction between the placidity of the Cazalet life and the endless drama that underlies it, drama that would call for serious disruption of that easygoing life and the relationships among the protagonists. The historical background to the events – the period leading up to the Second World War, (with flashbacks to the first one), the years of the War itself and then the aftermath of it – is so muted throughout that it might as well not exist. Very little of it impacts the Cazalets, who retain their business, their wealth, their homes almost to the very end. Politics, changes of government, events in the cultural life of the country are mentioned rarely and nearly dutifully, as if the author went over the manuscript and inserted some topical reference to cue us in on the period. The characters are infallibly civil with each other, communicating in the same polite tones you would use at a dinner party even while they are furious, jealous, angry, disappointed, sick or abused. Everybody calls everybody “darling” all the time.
Adultery, blatant and brazen, and the eventual abandonment of one of the Cazalet wives drags through four volumes until it concludes. The lesbian relationship of one of the Cazalet sisters is introduced in the first volume, by necessity hidden and agonized over; by the end of fourth volume, it is still being hidden and agonized over. The disappearance of the youngest Cazalet son during the war and his unexpected reappearance years later is accepted with pleasure by most but little is made of it: he is reabsorbed into daily life and his whereabouts for the lost years are not much probed. The early experiences of one of the young wives that include being date-raped while away from home, left pregnant by the rape and then losing the child, are recounted as if she had an unpleasant appendectomy and are never referred to between her and the husband to whom she returns. One of the other wives dies and is much mourned, but life goes on. The grief-stricken husband finds happiness some time later with a woman who appears, out of nowhere, at the end of the fourth volume, dea ex machina employed at the Cazalet offices.
There are the children of the three Cazalet brothers who gradually take over the narrative during the passage of time, and I thought the strongest point of the Chronicles is the depiction of those children throughout the books. Whereas the dialogue of the adults (with the exception of the servants who speak in an exaggeratedly lower class manner) is bland and uniform, the children are depicted in all their multifarious, rebellious or unhappy ways, each individual memorable. Until they grow up. Once grown up, their romances, disappointments and floundering become pretty much like that of the previous generations. Several young girls become infatuated with much older men. There is a love affair that develops between a half-brother-and-sister pair that, when discovered by the parents, is dismissed as youthful folly; and indeed in time it becomes that and is mentioned no more.
Four of the volumes were written during the first half of the nineties. It seemed to me that the fourth one, “Casting Off” came closest to some kind of resolution. The lives of several of the major characters appeared to come to a moment of fulfillment, romantic or otherwise, that, however arbitrarily depicted, seemed to provide a momentary conclusion. While many loose ends abound, there were at that point enough strands of the narrative that came to a satisfactory rest.
Then for some reason Elizabeth Jane Howard decided to write yet another volume, coming more than fifteen years after the preceding one and published in 2013, just before her death in January of 2014. In it we skip some ten years, most of the action now occurring in the latter fifties. The children we knew are grown; in fact several new ones have been born in the interval, starting a new, fourth generation. The conclusions of the fourth volume are thrown to the wind: life had gone on, as of course it has a tendency to do; happy endings turn out to be not so happy after all; the matriarch of the family dies; (“End of an Era!”), some other people conveniently die. One of the now grown daughters, Clary, whose life had gone through the same rollercoaster ups and downs as that of the others, remarks at a particularly difficult moment that “lives are not an easy thing to live.” (!) At some point Edward, the brazenly womanizing son who is now married to his long time lover and having a tiff with her, suddenly recalls his First World War experiences, previously barely alluded to in the whole course of the book. Details of the horrors of trench warfare are casually equated with his problems concerning dinner and his surly wife.
At the end of the Chronicles the Cazalet business goes bankrupt and we follow for some little time the reactions of the many members of the family, several generations of it, to this event. There is a – dare I say – Buddenbrookian feeling to the arc that becomes somewhat clear by the conclusion: there was the patriarchal generation that had built something and accumulated wealth; the middle generation of the sons who are running the enterprise under compulsion and are either disinterested or incompetent; and the third generation that scatters, having no desire to be involved in the family business, some wishing to pursue the arts, some going off to different continents, one becoming a monk, another a gardener, and so on. Thus we say good-bye to the Cazelets.
What I felt ultimately is that Elizabeth Jane Howard had several, perhaps as many as eight or ten lovely novels in her, along the lines of “Something in Disguise”, my original favorite, all of which were crammed into this multivolume tome. Many characters, many storylines in the Chronicles deserve and would have been better served by a narrative of their own. As it is, being crowded into a giant saga over which the author has no sufficient control, they lose their thread, meander around and get suffocated in the attempt to provide a grand scheme that does not materialize. I would have actually loved to follow some Cazalets into their own story. As it is, I am very glad I am finally done with their company, and, unlike some other end-of-multivolume-book moments when, regretfully coming to the last page, I was already looking forward to the eventual re-reading it, this time I am simply relieved to let them go.
From the first volume on to the end, there is the hard to reconcile contradiction between the placidity of the Cazalet life and the endless drama that underlies it, drama that would call for serious disruption of that easygoing life and the relationships among the protagonists. The historical background to the events – the period leading up to the Second World War, (with flashbacks to the first one), the years of the War itself and then the aftermath of it – is so muted throughout that it might as well not exist. Very little of it impacts the Cazalets, who retain their business, their wealth, their homes almost to the very end. Politics, changes of government, events in the cultural life of the country are mentioned rarely and nearly dutifully, as if the author went over the manuscript and inserted some topical reference to cue us in on the period. The characters are infallibly civil with each other, communicating in the same polite tones you would use at a dinner party even while they are furious, jealous, angry, disappointed, sick or abused. Everybody calls everybody “darling” all the time.
Adultery, blatant and brazen, and the eventual abandonment of one of the Cazalet wives drags through four volumes until it concludes. The lesbian relationship of one of the Cazalet sisters is introduced in the first volume, by necessity hidden and agonized over; by the end of fourth volume, it is still being hidden and agonized over. The disappearance of the youngest Cazalet son during the war and his unexpected reappearance years later is accepted with pleasure by most but little is made of it: he is reabsorbed into daily life and his whereabouts for the lost years are not much probed. The early experiences of one of the young wives that include being date-raped while away from home, left pregnant by the rape and then losing the child, are recounted as if she had an unpleasant appendectomy and are never referred to between her and the husband to whom she returns. One of the other wives dies and is much mourned, but life goes on. The grief-stricken husband finds happiness some time later with a woman who appears, out of nowhere, at the end of the fourth volume, dea ex machina employed at the Cazalet offices.
There are the children of the three Cazalet brothers who gradually take over the narrative during the passage of time, and I thought the strongest point of the Chronicles is the depiction of those children throughout the books. Whereas the dialogue of the adults (with the exception of the servants who speak in an exaggeratedly lower class manner) is bland and uniform, the children are depicted in all their multifarious, rebellious or unhappy ways, each individual memorable. Until they grow up. Once grown up, their romances, disappointments and floundering become pretty much like that of the previous generations. Several young girls become infatuated with much older men. There is a love affair that develops between a half-brother-and-sister pair that, when discovered by the parents, is dismissed as youthful folly; and indeed in time it becomes that and is mentioned no more.
Four of the volumes were written during the first half of the nineties. It seemed to me that the fourth one, “Casting Off” came closest to some kind of resolution. The lives of several of the major characters appeared to come to a moment of fulfillment, romantic or otherwise, that, however arbitrarily depicted, seemed to provide a momentary conclusion. While many loose ends abound, there were at that point enough strands of the narrative that came to a satisfactory rest.
Then for some reason Elizabeth Jane Howard decided to write yet another volume, coming more than fifteen years after the preceding one and published in 2013, just before her death in January of 2014. In it we skip some ten years, most of the action now occurring in the latter fifties. The children we knew are grown; in fact several new ones have been born in the interval, starting a new, fourth generation. The conclusions of the fourth volume are thrown to the wind: life had gone on, as of course it has a tendency to do; happy endings turn out to be not so happy after all; the matriarch of the family dies; (“End of an Era!”), some other people conveniently die. One of the now grown daughters, Clary, whose life had gone through the same rollercoaster ups and downs as that of the others, remarks at a particularly difficult moment that “lives are not an easy thing to live.” (!) At some point Edward, the brazenly womanizing son who is now married to his long time lover and having a tiff with her, suddenly recalls his First World War experiences, previously barely alluded to in the whole course of the book. Details of the horrors of trench warfare are casually equated with his problems concerning dinner and his surly wife.
At the end of the Chronicles the Cazalet business goes bankrupt and we follow for some little time the reactions of the many members of the family, several generations of it, to this event. There is a – dare I say – Buddenbrookian feeling to the arc that becomes somewhat clear by the conclusion: there was the patriarchal generation that had built something and accumulated wealth; the middle generation of the sons who are running the enterprise under compulsion and are either disinterested or incompetent; and the third generation that scatters, having no desire to be involved in the family business, some wishing to pursue the arts, some going off to different continents, one becoming a monk, another a gardener, and so on. Thus we say good-bye to the Cazelets.
What I felt ultimately is that Elizabeth Jane Howard had several, perhaps as many as eight or ten lovely novels in her, along the lines of “Something in Disguise”, my original favorite, all of which were crammed into this multivolume tome. Many characters, many storylines in the Chronicles deserve and would have been better served by a narrative of their own. As it is, being crowded into a giant saga over which the author has no sufficient control, they lose their thread, meander around and get suffocated in the attempt to provide a grand scheme that does not materialize. I would have actually loved to follow some Cazalets into their own story. As it is, I am very glad I am finally done with their company, and, unlike some other end-of-multivolume-book moments when, regretfully coming to the last page, I was already looking forward to the eventual re-reading it, this time I am simply relieved to let them go.
