The Favourite

by Meredith Daneman

This is a novel about a woman coming to terms with her incestuous fantasies and her obsession with her father. Rosalind has grown up with her sense of the erotic dangerously at odds with her sense of the maternal. Now she begins to live out her lifelong expectations of betrayal.

Meredith Daneman was born in Tasmania and educated in Sydney, Australia. At sixteen she won a scholarship to the Royal Ballet School in London. She appeared at Covent Garden with the Royal Opera Ballet and was a founding member of the Australian Ballet. Her first novel, A Chance to Sit Down, was published in 1971; this was followed by The Groundling (1982) and Francie and the Boys (1988). She is currently working on a biography of Margot Fonteyn. She and her husband, the actor Paul Daneman, live in London and have two daughters.

Genres: Fiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

Reviews

[Harris Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this immensely. It’s written in the first person, and though it’s not said I believe it must be a memoir. A cathartic piece of writing that expunges the ghosts from the narrator’s childhood family and her own subsequent family.

The stories are distinct though fragments of both are interwoven so that recurring themes in both families are clearly seen. The timeline is not linear, since it reasons our lives have their own rhythms that bend time, take us around in circles or make familiar connections with the past.

Disappointingly, for the brilliance that preceded it, I found the final paragraph, though necessary, too dramatic. I would have felt more comfortable with it placed a little further back.

That said, behaviours, or failings, that run consistently through the families are quite dark: betrayal, adultery, suicide, incestuous desire, and criminality, but they’re all treated with a featherlight touch of wit and humour, at times with irony or intelligence, such that there’s always a wise benignity running through the book. Likewise tropes such as coming of age, motherhood and offspring are neither treated in a sentimental nor superficial way. Daneman has uncovered fundamental truths about the innocent beauties or dark passions of the narrator’s life. All this with a considered language that is personable, attractive and easy to engage with.

Brilliant.

[Zoe · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Time, the great cake with candles, has shamed me thus: there is not, there never could have been, a favourite." This was an unexpected read, I just picked it up at a bookshop because I liked the cover and I fell in love. Daneman has the most beautiful, personal way of writing and the story itself is so real and complicated. This book explores relationships between Rosalind and her mother, father, sisters, children and lovers. It is beautifully human and I am so glad to have read this.

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

seems a damn good read. didn't know i could care about some of this emotional stuff, but i can.

[Katerina · Rating 3 out of 5]

If this book had one theme, it was daddy issues. The relationship between the main character and her father is complicated and leans towards emotional incest at points. This is supposed to be the origin of the main character's problems, but she was really a flawed character beyond this. The writing style was interesting and made for some impactful scenes, but the novel's structure was pretty confusing and the characters were generally all unlikeable. There were so many holes in the story that would've made it better if they were filled in, like how she ended up becoming her partner's mistress before they married, or why her father favored her over her siblings. I did enjoy the descriptions of her mother and how her own experiences of motherhood paralleled what she observed in childhood. Overall a compelling book that was dragged down by a messy storyline.

[Peyton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and compelling, yet the novel fails in its writing. Plot is the only movement for the piece, and it is quite frankly impossible to completely see the scenes of the novel as they are never from a present moment, but always abstracted and told from a later perspective, including moments taking place more recently. There is barely any dialogue in the novel, which I think worked against the book’s favor in that, once again, there was never any present moment to attach to. This method of storytelling was not fit for the narrative, because so much of the narrators pain was hinged off of specific moments of her life but we never got to see or understand them, only infer them.

[Vanessaschwync]

I didn't like this book a lot. I think the author does a lot of things before telling us each thing. Rosalind, the main character tells the story herself most of the times, but other times her mom tells the story in her point of view. She has a very hard life, but I didn't like the way the story was made nor the book expressed. Very bad.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story of Rosalind, the middle child and the go between for her parents off and on marriage. As an adult her marriage parallels her parents, her father left his first wife for her mother, Rosalind was the other woman and her husband left his first wife for her. But like her mother, she finds herself allowing her husband to bounce back and forth between her and the first wife.

[Frances · Rating 1 out of 5]

In a nutshell: the main character is dealing with betrayal from her cheating husband and her cheating father. As a child she is in a pseudo-sexual relationship with her own father in which she tries to make him stay as he repeatedly attempts to leave her mother and the family. In the end you find out that the father committed suicide and the main character sleeps with her daughter's boyfriend who is clearly a stand-in for the father. The whole thing is annoyingly in the present tense. Don't read it.