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.