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Manservant and Maidservant
At once the strangest and most marvelous of Ivy Compton-Burnett's fictions, Manservant and Maidservant has for its subject the domestic life of Horace Lamb, sadist, skinflint, and tyrant. But it is when Horace undergoes an altogether unforeseeable change of heart that the real difficulties begin. Is the repentant master a victim along with the former slave? And how can anyone endure the memory of the wrongs that have been done?
309 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1947
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About the author
Ivy Compton-Burnett
21 books127 followersDame Ivy Compton-Burnett, DBE was an English novelist, published (in the original hardback editions) as I. Compton-Burnett. She was awarded the 1955 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for her novel Mother and Son.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 89 reviews
September 9, 2021
LA GRANDE SIGNORINA
Downstairs Downton Abbey.
Horace Lamb è un padre tiranno affetto da avarizia maniacale che, pur vivendo dei soldi della moglie americana Charlotte, risparmia su tutto.
Fa soffrire il freddo (molte scene si svolgono davanti al caminetto, con fuoco acceso o spento – nel resto della casa si risparmia il carbone) a tutta la famiglia, e anche la fame ai suoi cinque figli che manda in giro con vestiti vecchi e malmessi.
La moglie Charlotte medita di lasciarlo per Mortimer, il cugino di Horace, da lui mantenuto perché non possiede nulla e non lavora.
Più saggi dei padroni sembrano i quattro membri della servitù che conquistano il titolo del romanzo: il maggiordomo, il cameriere, la sguattera, la cuoca.
Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884 – 1969).
Poco nota, non particolarmente amata, sottovalutata, dimenticata, Compton-Burnett concesse solo due o tre interviste poco prima di morire. Ma comunque si sa che era figlia di un medico solitario e dispotico, con un’infanzia piuttosto travagliata: la morte prematura di due fratelli e il suicidio di due sorelle adolescenti.
È dotata di rara e preziosa ironia - di sua madre disse:
la mamma ci vuole bene ma non le piacciamo!
Lavorò sulla struttura narrativa, intervenendo sul linguaggio come pochi prima di lei.
Le sue trame hanno sempre al centro una famiglia o due, una casa o due – da questo ne deriva che i domestici sono sempre personaggi centrali nel plot.
E ne deriva che anche gli incesti fanno spesso parte dei suoi intrecci.
Pubblicò venti romanzi tutti firmati I. Compton-Burnett.
Unità di tempo, di spazio e di azione, come nella tragedia greca (lei si laureò in greco, proprio sulla tragedia greca).
E anche il ricorso all’incesto rimanda alla tragedia greca.
Andando all'osso dei rapporti familiari, che secondo Compton-Burnett sono immutabili, arriva all'osso dei rapporti sociali.
D’altra parte, la famiglia è un microcosmo che riflette le dinamiche generali, e quindi, potere, odio, complicità, amore, voracità ecc.
Assenza di psicologia, descrizioni ridotte all’osso, dialogo, dialogo, e ancora dialogo. Serrato, brillante, spietato, divertente, spiritoso…
Concesse poche interviste, ma si concesse al fotografo con meno parsimonia.
Non si tratta di una scrittrice brava ma qualsiasi: si tratta di una delle più grandi scrittrici del '900, sicuramente di quelle in lingua inglese – per qualcuno superiore perfino a Virginia Woolf. La tradizione nella quale s’inserisce, per sua stessa scelta e ammissione, è quella che viene da Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charlotte ed Emily Brontë.
Ho letto diversi romanzi della Grande Signorina, non sono mai rimasto deluso. Qui sto provando a riassumere l’amore e l’ammirazione che leggerla mi ha ispirato.
Da quelle letture sono passati troppi anni perché io possa scriverne senza ricorrere anche alle parole di altri.
Molto amata da Natalia Ginzburg, ma chi citare meglio di Alberto Arbasino che me la fece scoprire, fu il primo a farmela conoscere e amare?
I romanzi della Grande Signorina sviluppano il loro grottesco e il loro orrido su posizioni d'apparente buon senso, sempre rovinoso: simili l'uno all'altro come sepolcrali villone tardo-vittoriane, piene dalla cantina ai solai di stravaganti ricchezze e di cuginette ingiustificate. Tutto il mondo, cupamente limitato alla cerchia domestica, e questa ridotta a "funzione" di complessi vocali indifferenti e bizzarri, occupatissimi in un incessante rituale di domande e risposte.
Poi anche:
Ivy Compton-Burnett, grande fra i più grandi narratori del nostro secolo, è anche, tipicamente, ‘autore di un solo romanzo’ - però moltiplicato per venti, giacché ha 'riscritto' (praticamente) lo stesso straordinario romanzo, con verve allucinatoria, con smisurata perfidia, per almeno quarant'anni, un anno sì e uno no.
E ancora:
Così, come davanti a Svevo o a Kafka, rivoluzionari in grisaille, la domanda critica più inquietante si identifica con un dubbio fondamentale: in quale misura questa persona d'ordine, e dai modi squisiti, e così attaccata ai 'valori' convenzionali, sa (programmaticamente…) che il suo 'gesto' stilistico fratturerà la Tradizione Narrativa né più né meno che le scoperte di Freud, di Schönberg, di Picasso, di Eisenstein?
Ecco l’incipit di questo romanzo, secondo me un assaggio del suo talento:
- Quel camino sta fumando? - disse Horace
- Pare di sì, caro ragazzo
- Non sto chiedendo cosa pare che faccia. Ho chiesto se sta fumando.
- Le apparenze non vengono mai considerate una chiave della verità, - disse suo cugino. - Ma temo che non ne abbiamo un'altra.
E qui Compton-Burnett con la sua consueta grazia e intelligenza fa godere Freud e regala subito una piccola lezione di psicanalisi: le apparenze non ingannano, bastano da sole a mostrarci il vero – non occorre sovrapporre gli indizi che abbiamo per interpretare la verità e farli coincidere con l'ordine delle cose verosimili, non vanno letti in chiave di credibilità, perché la verità emerge dal gioco tra ciò che è detto e ciò che non è detto ma si fa percepire.
La Grande Signorina sembra il membro assente da questa fotografia della celebre famiglia.
Downstairs Downton Abbey.
Horace Lamb è un padre tiranno affetto da avarizia maniacale che, pur vivendo dei soldi della moglie americana Charlotte, risparmia su tutto.
Fa soffrire il freddo (molte scene si svolgono davanti al caminetto, con fuoco acceso o spento – nel resto della casa si risparmia il carbone) a tutta la famiglia, e anche la fame ai suoi cinque figli che manda in giro con vestiti vecchi e malmessi.
La moglie Charlotte medita di lasciarlo per Mortimer, il cugino di Horace, da lui mantenuto perché non possiede nulla e non lavora.
Più saggi dei padroni sembrano i quattro membri della servitù che conquistano il titolo del romanzo: il maggiordomo, il cameriere, la sguattera, la cuoca.
Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884 – 1969).
Poco nota, non particolarmente amata, sottovalutata, dimenticata, Compton-Burnett concesse solo due o tre interviste poco prima di morire. Ma comunque si sa che era figlia di un medico solitario e dispotico, con un’infanzia piuttosto travagliata: la morte prematura di due fratelli e il suicidio di due sorelle adolescenti.
È dotata di rara e preziosa ironia - di sua madre disse:
la mamma ci vuole bene ma non le piacciamo!
Lavorò sulla struttura narrativa, intervenendo sul linguaggio come pochi prima di lei.
Le sue trame hanno sempre al centro una famiglia o due, una casa o due – da questo ne deriva che i domestici sono sempre personaggi centrali nel plot.
E ne deriva che anche gli incesti fanno spesso parte dei suoi intrecci.
Pubblicò venti romanzi tutti firmati I. Compton-Burnett.
Unità di tempo, di spazio e di azione, come nella tragedia greca (lei si laureò in greco, proprio sulla tragedia greca).
E anche il ricorso all’incesto rimanda alla tragedia greca.
Andando all'osso dei rapporti familiari, che secondo Compton-Burnett sono immutabili, arriva all'osso dei rapporti sociali.
D’altra parte, la famiglia è un microcosmo che riflette le dinamiche generali, e quindi, potere, odio, complicità, amore, voracità ecc.
Assenza di psicologia, descrizioni ridotte all’osso, dialogo, dialogo, e ancora dialogo. Serrato, brillante, spietato, divertente, spiritoso…
Concesse poche interviste, ma si concesse al fotografo con meno parsimonia.
Non si tratta di una scrittrice brava ma qualsiasi: si tratta di una delle più grandi scrittrici del '900, sicuramente di quelle in lingua inglese – per qualcuno superiore perfino a Virginia Woolf. La tradizione nella quale s’inserisce, per sua stessa scelta e ammissione, è quella che viene da Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charlotte ed Emily Brontë.
Ho letto diversi romanzi della Grande Signorina, non sono mai rimasto deluso. Qui sto provando a riassumere l’amore e l’ammirazione che leggerla mi ha ispirato.
Da quelle letture sono passati troppi anni perché io possa scriverne senza ricorrere anche alle parole di altri.
Molto amata da Natalia Ginzburg, ma chi citare meglio di Alberto Arbasino che me la fece scoprire, fu il primo a farmela conoscere e amare?
I romanzi della Grande Signorina sviluppano il loro grottesco e il loro orrido su posizioni d'apparente buon senso, sempre rovinoso: simili l'uno all'altro come sepolcrali villone tardo-vittoriane, piene dalla cantina ai solai di stravaganti ricchezze e di cuginette ingiustificate. Tutto il mondo, cupamente limitato alla cerchia domestica, e questa ridotta a "funzione" di complessi vocali indifferenti e bizzarri, occupatissimi in un incessante rituale di domande e risposte.
Poi anche:
Ivy Compton-Burnett, grande fra i più grandi narratori del nostro secolo, è anche, tipicamente, ‘autore di un solo romanzo’ - però moltiplicato per venti, giacché ha 'riscritto' (praticamente) lo stesso straordinario romanzo, con verve allucinatoria, con smisurata perfidia, per almeno quarant'anni, un anno sì e uno no.
E ancora:
Così, come davanti a Svevo o a Kafka, rivoluzionari in grisaille, la domanda critica più inquietante si identifica con un dubbio fondamentale: in quale misura questa persona d'ordine, e dai modi squisiti, e così attaccata ai 'valori' convenzionali, sa (programmaticamente…) che il suo 'gesto' stilistico fratturerà la Tradizione Narrativa né più né meno che le scoperte di Freud, di Schönberg, di Picasso, di Eisenstein?
Ecco l’incipit di questo romanzo, secondo me un assaggio del suo talento:
- Quel camino sta fumando? - disse Horace
- Pare di sì, caro ragazzo
- Non sto chiedendo cosa pare che faccia. Ho chiesto se sta fumando.
- Le apparenze non vengono mai considerate una chiave della verità, - disse suo cugino. - Ma temo che non ne abbiamo un'altra.
E qui Compton-Burnett con la sua consueta grazia e intelligenza fa godere Freud e regala subito una piccola lezione di psicanalisi: le apparenze non ingannano, bastano da sole a mostrarci il vero – non occorre sovrapporre gli indizi che abbiamo per interpretare la verità e farli coincidere con l'ordine delle cose verosimili, non vanno letti in chiave di credibilità, perché la verità emerge dal gioco tra ciò che è detto e ciò che non è detto ma si fa percepire.
La Grande Signorina sembra il membro assente da questa fotografia della celebre famiglia.
November 30, 2024
Read this twice now. I think I may have officially fallen in love with ICB and her crystalline cruelty. I read someone somewhere describing her sentences as rows of bayonets for us to step on. There is something about their extreme precision and the brutality and pain that lies underneath them that I find very affecting. I also simply get great pleasure from how my brain has to work from a slightly odd perspective in order to understand each line.
November 3, 2018
This is the story of a late 19th century English family, a family of some privilege (they have tenants), and the people who serve them. Mostly dialogue, it seems a pared-down classic novel from that time. Which is to say Class and Manners play heavily on the plot.
But something is askew. Yes, there are masters and servants, but they cross lines.
Some introductions are in order.
This is the home of Horace and Charlotte Lamb. Horace had married her for her money, hoping to serve his impoverished estate, and she had married him for love, hoping to fulfill herself. The love had gone and the money remained, so that advantage lay with Horace, if he could have taken so hopeful a view of his life. . . . He laid his hands on the balance of her income, and invested it in his own name, a practice that she viewed with an apparent indifference that was her cover for being unable to prevent it. She had put off remonstrance until it had become unthinkable. Horace held that saving the money, or rather preventing its being spent, was equivalent to earning it, and he pursued his course with a furtive discomfiture that clouded his life, though it could not subdue his nature.
The novel opens with Horace a tyrant, doling out equal parts frugality and sarcasm, his five children being the primary recipients. His victims are moved to mold some clay like a voodoo doll and torture the little thing with pins and fire. Horace's rheumatism flares. It's an early moment, like Chekhov's gun, that the reader feels must reappear.
So, the children cross lines too. Like this:
"Are you deaf, Sarah? Oh, you evidently are," said Horace, speaking with contempt for this infirmity. "What are you laughing at, Jasper?"
"If you call people deaf, you can't expect them to hear, and then you can't blame them for it."
Horace's cousin Mortimer lives there too, by Horace's grace. Of Mortimer: He would have been disappointed not to have a profession, if he had thought of having so expensive a thing. . . . His chief emotions were a strong and open feeling for his cousin, and a stronger and necessarily less open feeling for his cousin's wife.
I hope you caught that little plot development.
In the downstairs part of the cast are Bullivant and Mrs. Sheldon, the eponymous Manservant and Maidservant of the title. They might be my favorite characters this year.
There is also George, about 18 or 19, plucked from a workhouse to be Bullivant's assistant and challenge. George's opinions are unfiltered and his manners unrefined. He too will make the reader think of Chekhov's gun, waiting to go off.
There is a Miss Buchanan, who runs the post office, disguising the fact that she cannot read. It is such a small thing as that which the author uses to expose the character of others.
There is also a Mrs. Doubleday, with a face like George Eliot. (You either get that or you don't.)
It is after meeting Mrs. Doubleday that Horace changes. Like the Bizarro Seinfeld episode. Snap! Overnight he becomes attentive, caring. The fire burns brighter; supper is more bountiful.
Do the others believe it? Do we?
And then we see every other character, with an utterance or act, stepping just a bit out of character.
I said at the start of this review that the novel seemed a pared-down classic from that time. But it was written in 1947, by a woman who was a child at the time of the setting of this story. Her own life was complicated enough to spawn the characters within.
I finished, closed the book and opened the laptop, and ordered another by the same author. It will be here in two days!
But something is askew. Yes, there are masters and servants, but they cross lines.
Some introductions are in order.
This is the home of Horace and Charlotte Lamb. Horace had married her for her money, hoping to serve his impoverished estate, and she had married him for love, hoping to fulfill herself. The love had gone and the money remained, so that advantage lay with Horace, if he could have taken so hopeful a view of his life. . . . He laid his hands on the balance of her income, and invested it in his own name, a practice that she viewed with an apparent indifference that was her cover for being unable to prevent it. She had put off remonstrance until it had become unthinkable. Horace held that saving the money, or rather preventing its being spent, was equivalent to earning it, and he pursued his course with a furtive discomfiture that clouded his life, though it could not subdue his nature.
The novel opens with Horace a tyrant, doling out equal parts frugality and sarcasm, his five children being the primary recipients. His victims are moved to mold some clay like a voodoo doll and torture the little thing with pins and fire. Horace's rheumatism flares. It's an early moment, like Chekhov's gun, that the reader feels must reappear.
So, the children cross lines too. Like this:
"Are you deaf, Sarah? Oh, you evidently are," said Horace, speaking with contempt for this infirmity. "What are you laughing at, Jasper?"
"If you call people deaf, you can't expect them to hear, and then you can't blame them for it."
Horace's cousin Mortimer lives there too, by Horace's grace. Of Mortimer: He would have been disappointed not to have a profession, if he had thought of having so expensive a thing. . . . His chief emotions were a strong and open feeling for his cousin, and a stronger and necessarily less open feeling for his cousin's wife.
I hope you caught that little plot development.
In the downstairs part of the cast are Bullivant and Mrs. Sheldon, the eponymous Manservant and Maidservant of the title. They might be my favorite characters this year.
There is also George, about 18 or 19, plucked from a workhouse to be Bullivant's assistant and challenge. George's opinions are unfiltered and his manners unrefined. He too will make the reader think of Chekhov's gun, waiting to go off.
There is a Miss Buchanan, who runs the post office, disguising the fact that she cannot read. It is such a small thing as that which the author uses to expose the character of others.
There is also a Mrs. Doubleday, with a face like George Eliot. (You either get that or you don't.)
It is after meeting Mrs. Doubleday that Horace changes. Like the Bizarro Seinfeld episode. Snap! Overnight he becomes attentive, caring. The fire burns brighter; supper is more bountiful.
Do the others believe it? Do we?
And then we see every other character, with an utterance or act, stepping just a bit out of character.
I said at the start of this review that the novel seemed a pared-down classic from that time. But it was written in 1947, by a woman who was a child at the time of the setting of this story. Her own life was complicated enough to spawn the characters within.
I finished, closed the book and opened the laptop, and ordered another by the same author. It will be here in two days!
July 16, 2016
Rating: NO stars of five
BkC9) Next to SONS AND LOVERS, the worst, most horrendously offensively overrated piece of crap I've read in my life.
I have no reason to revisit this decision. I still feel slightly ill when I think about this boring, annoying book. I left my copy on the subway so some wino would pick it up and realize that life has more to offer than misery, boredom, and despair.
I refuse to go any further into this book's gynecology. I hate it too much, and yet still am not masochist enough to go at it with both barrels and an AK-47.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
BkC9) Next to SONS AND LOVERS, the worst, most horrendously offensively overrated piece of crap I've read in my life.
I have no reason to revisit this decision. I still feel slightly ill when I think about this boring, annoying book. I left my copy on the subway so some wino would pick it up and realize that life has more to offer than misery, boredom, and despair.
I refuse to go any further into this book's gynecology. I hate it too much, and yet still am not masochist enough to go at it with both barrels and an AK-47.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
January 24, 2023
3.5
An update to my brief review - for Compton-Burnett's fans, there is a rarely recorded interview with her still available to listen:
- https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs...
Compton-Burnett's formal and stilted style gets in the way of enjoyment. There are no social nuances in portraying masters, servants, children and adults. They all use the same formal manner of speech, no class or age differences. There are redeeming qualities though. Through dialogues -and this reads like a play in the novel form as almost all of the novel consists of dialogues- she succeeds to bring out the storytelling and all sorts of psychological undercurrents, from a tyrannical household and scheming blackmails to the soul awakening and inner goodness in the face of death. Still, the formality of language that feels antiquated and idiosyncratic sentence constructions demand from a reader to work out the meaning in too many places to enjoy it.
An update to my brief review - for Compton-Burnett's fans, there is a rarely recorded interview with her still available to listen:
- https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs...
Compton-Burnett's formal and stilted style gets in the way of enjoyment. There are no social nuances in portraying masters, servants, children and adults. They all use the same formal manner of speech, no class or age differences. There are redeeming qualities though. Through dialogues -and this reads like a play in the novel form as almost all of the novel consists of dialogues- she succeeds to bring out the storytelling and all sorts of psychological undercurrents, from a tyrannical household and scheming blackmails to the soul awakening and inner goodness in the face of death. Still, the formality of language that feels antiquated and idiosyncratic sentence constructions demand from a reader to work out the meaning in too many places to enjoy it.
September 17, 2019
Of all Ivy Compton-Burnett's books, this one interested me the most when I was wondering which to read. It was one of her two favourites among her own works. And, whilst most of her novels are about authoritarian late-Victorian households, Manservant and Maidservant stood out for its plot about an oppressive father who changes for the better - although everyone continues to live with the effects of his past abusive behaviour. I was intrigued to see how this would be portrayed by an author who grew up in a very dysfunctional family, and was in her sixties by the time she wrote this. Compton-Burnett is known for a stark, bracing and unsentimental style, so an idealised fable seemed unlikely.
However, Compton-Burnett's two favourites - this one and A House and Its Head, the two published by NYRB - are, in the UK, more expensive or otherwise more difficult to get hold of than several of her other novels. (At least three different British publishers have the UK rights to her various books, and not all have reissues in print.) So, after a few months wondering which of all the others I'd have to read if I finally wanted to tick off one Compton-Burnett book, I was delighted to find Manservant and Maidservant, albeit without the introductions from its two most recent editions (Penelope Lively for OUP in the 1980s, the last British edition, and Diane Johnson for NYRB - though it turns out that the latter is online here. N.B., it contains spoilers).
N.B. 2: this is a very long post that continues into the comment field.
Whilst there is certainly a lot of dialogue in Manservant and Maidservant, it's by no means all dialogue, as many reviewers describe it. (Though I understand some of her work is even more dialogue-heavy.) Narrative sometimes even goes on for a couple of pages at a stretch - such as the brilliant account of how shopkeeper Miss Buchanan tactically organises her life in order to conceal the fact that she can't read. This chimes perfectly with what people say in person and in quotes in articles about the same problem, over 100 years after the novel's late-Victorian setting. (It's set in 1892, to be precise: Mortimer says that it is his 54th birthday and that he was born in 1838.) Structurally, Compton-Burnett's own description of her books as "somewhere between a novel and a play" feels more representative of what I've read here.
I also didn't find it nearly as strange as a lot of readers seem to. But then, if one took elements from my own upbringing, plus features of the household of some austerely strict, posh family friends we knew when I was a kid, put these in a bag and shook it before plucking several out at random, some of the possible results would be a lot like the Lambs at the beginning of Manservant and Maidservant. There is, incidentally, no physical or sexual abuse in the novel: Horace Lamb's is a tyranny of words, emotions and finances. (The blurb description of him as a sadist does not fit, but he is austerely strict, short on empathy, and sensitive in a way that leads him to attack others.)
This rare 21st century press article about ICB quotes one of her biographers, Hilary Spurling: "Ivy's books sold in large numbers in the second war to a general public which responded... without reservations to the severe and startling honesty of a writer whose moral economy had, so to speak, always been organised on a war footing. The effect of stiffness and surface distortion no longer seemed a problem in a world where the comforting half-truths, clichés and conformist platitudes of convention were temporarily in abeyance." Perhaps if life on something like a war footing has seemed normal in a person's life, as it does in such difficult families, her worlds seem less strange. Though, currently, even for many who had wonderful childhoods, the mood of Brexit is now creating something like a war footing in public life.
Compton-Burnett illustrates with remarkable precision Horace's unannounced oscillations of mood, sometimes subtle, sometimes extreme: the way that, to outsiders, the things he is unreasonable about and what he is - therefore confoundingly and surprisingly - reasonable or even indulgent about, could seem almost random; the way he digs and digs at small details that anyone nice would ignore, as he transmutes his sense of injury and frustration into others' fear; and the tightness of his authority that has everyone on guard at all times. The tedium of life with a person like this, and of the low-level tension, is so astutely captured. Almost everything is refracted through Horace, and I was reminded of a metaphor of the effects of the dysfunctional family as fairground mirror, which I think came from this book. The use of so much dialogue, with so little commentary, recreates the direct experience of what it is like to be around a person like him. (And these days, I just wanted to tell him this was completely unacceptable and I wasn't putting up with it. I'm not sure I could have read a whole book of him admonishing his family, but I knew before starting that he wasn't going to be like this constantly.)
With this attention to detail in Horace's utterances, and even more so with the imperfections and shifts in the first iteration of "new" Horace, I started to feel that all other such characters in fiction were mere caricatures: this was actually what a real person is like in their complexity, with details of continually flickering shadow and light that most might find it too finicky to portray. (But she just does it by writing down what people say.)
I found the same sense of complex real-personness in a couple of other characters too. In the outspoken young footman, George, though, it was harder to pinpoint how it's actually done. George is more consistent in personality than Horace, yet he somehow seemed 3D to an extent that not many made-up people do. Gertrude Doubleday, the ageing mother of the Lambs' new tutor, who starts to become their family friend, I found myself placing on a scale of "quite nice", with a precise sense of how much I would trust her and with what, and the ways in which she would be tiring and irritating, and ways she'd be okay: a very middling sort of feeling that, again, I find deeply relevant to real people, but rarely think about for fictional ones, who are usually more cartoonish and emphatic than these characters, in ways I feel like I hadn't even noticed before. It may be rare in real life to find so many people in one place who speak in the mannered, epigrammatic style of ICB's characters, (but there are real individuals who do, and they are certainly not all from wealthy backgrounds) yet the shape of what certain of the characters say, and the sense of them as people that builds up, feels incredibly lifelike to me. It's a sort of alchemy that evidently works very well for some readers, and not at all for others, judging by recent reviews. (Compton-Burnett was entirely aware of the artificiality of the dialogue, and includes several metafictional remarks about it, such as, addressed to the cook, "You have language, Mrs. Selden, beyond what would be looked for."
Such heavy presence of dialogue creates an interesting paradox which many admirers have mentioned: there is also so much unsaid. As Diane Johnson's introduction says, Horace, at one point, "is stating the exact opposite of the modern belief that in words lie therapeutic possibilities for healing and rapprochement. If we can begin to express our feelings, we are taught, we can begin to master them." This is the kind of household in which you (especially as a child with a parent like Horace) may not want to hear what some other people really feel, because there's a high chance it might be horrible - and in which you don't want those people to know what *you* really feel, because experience suggests they may use it against you, or at best misunderstand.
The children can seem strangely assertive - but I remember what it was like using approaches learned from reasonable teachers and nannies, on an unreasonably angry parent, to no avail, and the Lambs are simply doing the same. It's a bit later, when you are thinking more for yourself, and no longer bolstered by the confidence that comes from parroting other adults (some of whom won't be employed to look after older children) that you can become more cowed. There are other times when the children can seem like the amended replays that emerge in some forms of therapy: what would it feel better to have done or said. Or their dialogue is part of a construction in which a father like Horace is told what he should have been told. It demonstrates in writing that he just wasn't listening, when later he says "if only you'd said". They did say. The novel can seem like an unusually elegant form of therapeutic writing.
Tea at the Doubledays was a wonderfully created, and therefore excruciating, scene - ICB writes marvellous examples of uncomfortable and embarrassing social situations. It surprised me again that the Lambs were not actually affronted. This is why they are such a great portrait - they are unpredictable and sometimes nice when one would not think they would be (including Horace), in a way that someone who didn't know difficult families from the inside would rarely think to invent.
I haven't read as much analysis of the novel's historical context as I would like. (This thesis abstract looks rather fascinating, but there's no more online.) It would be interesting to know to what extent ICB is, in this 1947 novel, considered to be portraying the concerns of post-WWII England as compared with those of the 1890s. The household revolt against rationed firewood and worn clothes seems to echo the exhausted complaints of the British public at the time - and they still had several more years of rationing to go. Labour-saving products - known in the 1890s, but about to explode in popularity in the 1950s - are a matter of remark. And young George, in his refusal to learn deference from the butler and cook, seems like the herald of a time when being in service, and keeping servants - as well as the scale of gentry estates themselves, under the Attlee government - were in sudden and precipitous decline as a more equal society began to emerge. However, most accounts of below-stairs life from much earlier than the late 19th century also have their Georges: the ones who were defiantly individual and seemed to have little belief in the Great Chain of Being, unlike the senior staff; they seem unlikely to rise to the top of the servants' realm, and one hopes they will find different work, and not end up arrested or thrown out destitute.
Biographical interpretations of novels, especially novels by female authors, are rather frowned upon at the moment, as denigrating writers' creativity - but if your interests are history and psychology rather than something or other to do with literary standards, they are fascinating. There are features of Manservant and Maidservant which echo Compton-Burnett's life, beyond the perennial theme of household authoritarianism.
Biographer Hilary Spurling again: [Her favourite brother] "Noel's departure left Ivy shut up at home with her mother, condemned to teach her four younger sisters, without friends of her own or openings or any imaginable prospect of escape. She had worn black throughout her youth and in the long years of mourning her father and [other favourite brother] Guy, and she wore it again in 1911 when Mrs Compton Burnett died of cancer after a long and debilitating illness.
Under her mother's will, Ivy inherited the post of head of household, establishing her own autocratic rule over her four sisters until they mutinied in 1915, and ran away together to set up an independent establishment in defiance of her authority in London."
It seems that Ivy knew what it was both to be controlled and to be controlling; I can't help think that she writes these situations so very well because she knows what it is to live both sides. The storyline of Horace's repentance, his continued imperfections, and his self-pity, paralleled with great attention to its effect on the victims, all written decades later, read like a highly developed working-through of such a past.
Spurling: "Ivy fell ill after the inquest [into her sisters' suicide at Christmas 1917], and very nearly died herself in the deadly flu epidemic that swept London the following summer. She emerged slowly and painfully over the next few years from a period of prolonged mental, physical and emotional prostration, a state she described at the time as death in life. The publication of Pastors and Masters marked her recovery: a final distancing from the experiences of her first forty years which she never discussed in fact, but whose implications she would spend the next forty years and more exploring in fiction."
It's not unusual for classic literature to show illness as a catalyst for personal transformation (I've just read another example, in Robinson Crusoe, the book I started right after this one), but the above period of Compton-Burnett's life is easy to relate to this novel. Did she, did her fictional creation, dread dying after only just starting to work out how to be a better person? In the protracted descriptions of illness late in Manservant and Maidservant, it felt like witnessing life during the 1918 flu: the twists and turns of fever's crisis and lull, perhaps several successive instances in a household here rolled into one individual. The descriptions, at once vividly dramatic and highly disciplined, transmit the precariousness and formality of life 100 or 120 years ago, and the profound tiringness of such an experience even as an onlooker, and with far greater skill than most non-fiction about the period.
I never expected to find anything supernatural in an Ivy Compton-Burnett book: she has a reputation for books that are mannered but realist. But there is a key scene near the beginning of Manservant and Maidservant which seemed like her darker parallel to the start of Mary Poppins. It is never remarked on again, which is very interesting in itself, (it lurks in the mind like all the things that can't be spoken in such a house) although it can potentially be related to pivotal events later in the novel.
Continued in comment field below.
However, Compton-Burnett's two favourites - this one and A House and Its Head, the two published by NYRB - are, in the UK, more expensive or otherwise more difficult to get hold of than several of her other novels. (At least three different British publishers have the UK rights to her various books, and not all have reissues in print.) So, after a few months wondering which of all the others I'd have to read if I finally wanted to tick off one Compton-Burnett book, I was delighted to find Manservant and Maidservant, albeit without the introductions from its two most recent editions (Penelope Lively for OUP in the 1980s, the last British edition, and Diane Johnson for NYRB - though it turns out that the latter is online here. N.B., it contains spoilers).
N.B. 2: this is a very long post that continues into the comment field.
Whilst there is certainly a lot of dialogue in Manservant and Maidservant, it's by no means all dialogue, as many reviewers describe it. (Though I understand some of her work is even more dialogue-heavy.) Narrative sometimes even goes on for a couple of pages at a stretch - such as the brilliant account of how shopkeeper Miss Buchanan tactically organises her life in order to conceal the fact that she can't read. This chimes perfectly with what people say in person and in quotes in articles about the same problem, over 100 years after the novel's late-Victorian setting. (It's set in 1892, to be precise: Mortimer says that it is his 54th birthday and that he was born in 1838.) Structurally, Compton-Burnett's own description of her books as "somewhere between a novel and a play" feels more representative of what I've read here.
I also didn't find it nearly as strange as a lot of readers seem to. But then, if one took elements from my own upbringing, plus features of the household of some austerely strict, posh family friends we knew when I was a kid, put these in a bag and shook it before plucking several out at random, some of the possible results would be a lot like the Lambs at the beginning of Manservant and Maidservant. There is, incidentally, no physical or sexual abuse in the novel: Horace Lamb's is a tyranny of words, emotions and finances. (The blurb description of him as a sadist does not fit, but he is austerely strict, short on empathy, and sensitive in a way that leads him to attack others.)
This rare 21st century press article about ICB quotes one of her biographers, Hilary Spurling: "Ivy's books sold in large numbers in the second war to a general public which responded... without reservations to the severe and startling honesty of a writer whose moral economy had, so to speak, always been organised on a war footing. The effect of stiffness and surface distortion no longer seemed a problem in a world where the comforting half-truths, clichés and conformist platitudes of convention were temporarily in abeyance." Perhaps if life on something like a war footing has seemed normal in a person's life, as it does in such difficult families, her worlds seem less strange. Though, currently, even for many who had wonderful childhoods, the mood of Brexit is now creating something like a war footing in public life.
Compton-Burnett illustrates with remarkable precision Horace's unannounced oscillations of mood, sometimes subtle, sometimes extreme: the way that, to outsiders, the things he is unreasonable about and what he is - therefore confoundingly and surprisingly - reasonable or even indulgent about, could seem almost random; the way he digs and digs at small details that anyone nice would ignore, as he transmutes his sense of injury and frustration into others' fear; and the tightness of his authority that has everyone on guard at all times. The tedium of life with a person like this, and of the low-level tension, is so astutely captured. Almost everything is refracted through Horace, and I was reminded of a metaphor of the effects of the dysfunctional family as fairground mirror, which I think came from this book. The use of so much dialogue, with so little commentary, recreates the direct experience of what it is like to be around a person like him. (And these days, I just wanted to tell him this was completely unacceptable and I wasn't putting up with it. I'm not sure I could have read a whole book of him admonishing his family, but I knew before starting that he wasn't going to be like this constantly.)
With this attention to detail in Horace's utterances, and even more so with the imperfections and shifts in the first iteration of "new" Horace, I started to feel that all other such characters in fiction were mere caricatures: this was actually what a real person is like in their complexity, with details of continually flickering shadow and light that most might find it too finicky to portray. (But she just does it by writing down what people say.)
I found the same sense of complex real-personness in a couple of other characters too. In the outspoken young footman, George, though, it was harder to pinpoint how it's actually done. George is more consistent in personality than Horace, yet he somehow seemed 3D to an extent that not many made-up people do. Gertrude Doubleday, the ageing mother of the Lambs' new tutor, who starts to become their family friend, I found myself placing on a scale of "quite nice", with a precise sense of how much I would trust her and with what, and the ways in which she would be tiring and irritating, and ways she'd be okay: a very middling sort of feeling that, again, I find deeply relevant to real people, but rarely think about for fictional ones, who are usually more cartoonish and emphatic than these characters, in ways I feel like I hadn't even noticed before. It may be rare in real life to find so many people in one place who speak in the mannered, epigrammatic style of ICB's characters, (but there are real individuals who do, and they are certainly not all from wealthy backgrounds) yet the shape of what certain of the characters say, and the sense of them as people that builds up, feels incredibly lifelike to me. It's a sort of alchemy that evidently works very well for some readers, and not at all for others, judging by recent reviews. (Compton-Burnett was entirely aware of the artificiality of the dialogue, and includes several metafictional remarks about it, such as, addressed to the cook, "You have language, Mrs. Selden, beyond what would be looked for."
Such heavy presence of dialogue creates an interesting paradox which many admirers have mentioned: there is also so much unsaid. As Diane Johnson's introduction says, Horace, at one point, "is stating the exact opposite of the modern belief that in words lie therapeutic possibilities for healing and rapprochement. If we can begin to express our feelings, we are taught, we can begin to master them." This is the kind of household in which you (especially as a child with a parent like Horace) may not want to hear what some other people really feel, because there's a high chance it might be horrible - and in which you don't want those people to know what *you* really feel, because experience suggests they may use it against you, or at best misunderstand.
The children can seem strangely assertive - but I remember what it was like using approaches learned from reasonable teachers and nannies, on an unreasonably angry parent, to no avail, and the Lambs are simply doing the same. It's a bit later, when you are thinking more for yourself, and no longer bolstered by the confidence that comes from parroting other adults (some of whom won't be employed to look after older children) that you can become more cowed. There are other times when the children can seem like the amended replays that emerge in some forms of therapy: what would it feel better to have done or said. Or their dialogue is part of a construction in which a father like Horace is told what he should have been told. It demonstrates in writing that he just wasn't listening, when later he says "if only you'd said". They did say. The novel can seem like an unusually elegant form of therapeutic writing.
Tea at the Doubledays was a wonderfully created, and therefore excruciating, scene - ICB writes marvellous examples of uncomfortable and embarrassing social situations. It surprised me again that the Lambs were not actually affronted. This is why they are such a great portrait - they are unpredictable and sometimes nice when one would not think they would be (including Horace), in a way that someone who didn't know difficult families from the inside would rarely think to invent.
I haven't read as much analysis of the novel's historical context as I would like. (This thesis abstract looks rather fascinating, but there's no more online.) It would be interesting to know to what extent ICB is, in this 1947 novel, considered to be portraying the concerns of post-WWII England as compared with those of the 1890s. The household revolt against rationed firewood and worn clothes seems to echo the exhausted complaints of the British public at the time - and they still had several more years of rationing to go. Labour-saving products - known in the 1890s, but about to explode in popularity in the 1950s - are a matter of remark. And young George, in his refusal to learn deference from the butler and cook, seems like the herald of a time when being in service, and keeping servants - as well as the scale of gentry estates themselves, under the Attlee government - were in sudden and precipitous decline as a more equal society began to emerge. However, most accounts of below-stairs life from much earlier than the late 19th century also have their Georges: the ones who were defiantly individual and seemed to have little belief in the Great Chain of Being, unlike the senior staff; they seem unlikely to rise to the top of the servants' realm, and one hopes they will find different work, and not end up arrested or thrown out destitute.
Biographical interpretations of novels, especially novels by female authors, are rather frowned upon at the moment, as denigrating writers' creativity - but if your interests are history and psychology rather than something or other to do with literary standards, they are fascinating. There are features of Manservant and Maidservant which echo Compton-Burnett's life, beyond the perennial theme of household authoritarianism.
Biographer Hilary Spurling again: [Her favourite brother] "Noel's departure left Ivy shut up at home with her mother, condemned to teach her four younger sisters, without friends of her own or openings or any imaginable prospect of escape. She had worn black throughout her youth and in the long years of mourning her father and [other favourite brother] Guy, and she wore it again in 1911 when Mrs Compton Burnett died of cancer after a long and debilitating illness.
Under her mother's will, Ivy inherited the post of head of household, establishing her own autocratic rule over her four sisters until they mutinied in 1915, and ran away together to set up an independent establishment in defiance of her authority in London."
It seems that Ivy knew what it was both to be controlled and to be controlling; I can't help think that she writes these situations so very well because she knows what it is to live both sides. The storyline of Horace's repentance, his continued imperfections, and his self-pity, paralleled with great attention to its effect on the victims, all written decades later, read like a highly developed working-through of such a past.
Spurling: "Ivy fell ill after the inquest [into her sisters' suicide at Christmas 1917], and very nearly died herself in the deadly flu epidemic that swept London the following summer. She emerged slowly and painfully over the next few years from a period of prolonged mental, physical and emotional prostration, a state she described at the time as death in life. The publication of Pastors and Masters marked her recovery: a final distancing from the experiences of her first forty years which she never discussed in fact, but whose implications she would spend the next forty years and more exploring in fiction."
It's not unusual for classic literature to show illness as a catalyst for personal transformation (I've just read another example, in Robinson Crusoe, the book I started right after this one), but the above period of Compton-Burnett's life is easy to relate to this novel. Did she, did her fictional creation, dread dying after only just starting to work out how to be a better person? In the protracted descriptions of illness late in Manservant and Maidservant, it felt like witnessing life during the 1918 flu: the twists and turns of fever's crisis and lull, perhaps several successive instances in a household here rolled into one individual. The descriptions, at once vividly dramatic and highly disciplined, transmit the precariousness and formality of life 100 or 120 years ago, and the profound tiringness of such an experience even as an onlooker, and with far greater skill than most non-fiction about the period.
I never expected to find anything supernatural in an Ivy Compton-Burnett book: she has a reputation for books that are mannered but realist. But there is a key scene near the beginning of Manservant and Maidservant which seemed like her darker parallel to the start of Mary Poppins. It is never remarked on again, which is very interesting in itself, (it lurks in the mind like all the things that can't be spoken in such a house) although it can potentially be related to pivotal events later in the novel.
Continued in comment field below.
July 24, 2009
When I read Michael Dirda’s Classics for Pleasure I came away with a list of interesting prospects; Manservant and Maidservant was the last on that list. Every one of Dirda’s recommendations has panned out but none more so than this novel. I had put off reading my copy for the longest time because I was afraid I wouldn’t like it. I don’t have a native love of Victorian authors (or Victorian-style authors, Compton-Burnett published this in 1947); some I like, some I don’t. But from the first page this novel enchanted me. It’s hard to describe just how much fun this book was to read even though it demands focus and concentration. It’s like working hard on a college paper about a subject you’re interested in – it takes a lot of effort and mental sweat but when it’s over, you feel like you’ve accomplished something.
Manservant and Maidservant is a rather dark comedy about the Lamb family, their servants, and several incidental characters who cross their paths. The primary plot revolves around Horace Lamb, the patriarch, “sadist, skinflint, and tyrant, a man whose children fear and hate him and whose wife is planning to elope.” (backcover blurb) A life-changing event alters Horace’s behavior toward everyone but it’s hard to overcome all that has come before.
Compton-Burnett writes almost entirely in dialog but can still give a vivid description of a character or scene when necessary. And, as I mentioned at the beginning, it takes a certain amount of effort to follow what’s happening but it’s worth it. To give you just a taste of her style:
One of the best reading experiences I’ve had in a long time so I would recommend this novel without reserve.
Manservant and Maidservant is a rather dark comedy about the Lamb family, their servants, and several incidental characters who cross their paths. The primary plot revolves around Horace Lamb, the patriarch, “sadist, skinflint, and tyrant, a man whose children fear and hate him and whose wife is planning to elope.” (backcover blurb) A life-changing event alters Horace’s behavior toward everyone but it’s hard to overcome all that has come before.
Compton-Burnett writes almost entirely in dialog but can still give a vivid description of a character or scene when necessary. And, as I mentioned at the beginning, it takes a certain amount of effort to follow what’s happening but it’s worth it. To give you just a taste of her style:
“There was One that saw you, George. There was the all-seeing Eye. Did you think, as you plied your guilty task, that you were not seen? Did you forget your early teaching, the lessons you learnt in infancy?”
“You tell me to leave that part of my training behind.”
“Do not indulge in trivialities, George, at this moment of your life. That can only mean what it does.”
“And will mean it for himself,” said Cook.
“But how did you know? You can’t know anything. You are pretending to know,” said George, not doubting the divine observation as much as the conveyance of its results to Bullivant. (p. 267)
One of the best reading experiences I’ve had in a long time so I would recommend this novel without reserve.
February 6, 2022
In Manservant and Maidservant, Compton-Burnett eases her staccato prose, laden with interstitial tone and meaning, though it remains mostly dialog frosted with lies--lies in their infinite variety of dissembling and concealment. The exception is the children, who echo the truths the adults avoid; the children have the most astute lines in the book. C-B's "novels" are really plays, pared down to electric flashes as if crossing gaps, shorting out. Considered in the large, they are comedy of manners. But these really are "manners," the veneer of class and personal division and aggression. Very English manners, and post-Victorian. Their inevitable stage, the large English country house, looms over the declining gentility.
Here the dominant tyrant is ironically named Lamb, Horace Lamb. A tightwad as are many of Compton-Burnett's declining gentry, Horace undergoes a change and a real threat, which he dismisses, leading to his somewhat estranged wife's observation, "People forgive a real injury more easily than a slight one," which in turn leads her to state the novelist's credo: "I suppose a good deal happens in daily life. We have only to look at what is near to us to find the drama of existence. It seems a pity that that is so."(252)
Bullivant the butler is a major character, and the servants develop their own hilarity; the cook, the young manservant George, and Miriam. Perhaps Horace Lamb's tyrrany is mirrored in Bullivant's articulate dominance.
In these narrative plays, voices dominate, and one of the oddest effects is an occasional unexpected presence, as here with Horace's elder cousin Mortimer. As Horace is soliloquizing, "Can I regain my feelings as a father? Can we treat them as simple boys? [while he suspects them of engineering a plank in a bridge to collapse and kill him]" A voice out of nowhere appears, "Can I be of any help, dear boy?" Mortimer always calls Horace that. But where in heck did he come from? Probably this is an effect that arises from the large English country house, where people may appear without others' cognizance.
Here the dominant tyrant is ironically named Lamb, Horace Lamb. A tightwad as are many of Compton-Burnett's declining gentry, Horace undergoes a change and a real threat, which he dismisses, leading to his somewhat estranged wife's observation, "People forgive a real injury more easily than a slight one," which in turn leads her to state the novelist's credo: "I suppose a good deal happens in daily life. We have only to look at what is near to us to find the drama of existence. It seems a pity that that is so."(252)
Bullivant the butler is a major character, and the servants develop their own hilarity; the cook, the young manservant George, and Miriam. Perhaps Horace Lamb's tyrrany is mirrored in Bullivant's articulate dominance.
In these narrative plays, voices dominate, and one of the oddest effects is an occasional unexpected presence, as here with Horace's elder cousin Mortimer. As Horace is soliloquizing, "Can I regain my feelings as a father? Can we treat them as simple boys? [while he suspects them of engineering a plank in a bridge to collapse and kill him]" A voice out of nowhere appears, "Can I be of any help, dear boy?" Mortimer always calls Horace that. But where in heck did he come from? Probably this is an effect that arises from the large English country house, where people may appear without others' cognizance.
October 9, 2009
If Oscar Wilde and Molière tried to write Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, they might have come up with something like Manservant and Maidservant. On one hand, this book seems to be a comedy of errors like The Importance of Being Earnest. On the other hand, it seems to be a satire like The Misanthrope. On yet the other hand, there is a delightful storyline revolving around the five Lamb children that's reminiscent of some perennially popular 19th Century children's novels.
I kept hearing that this novel is difficult to read because it's almost all dialogue. I didn't find it difficult for that reason. Reading Manservant and Maidservant was very much like reading a play. I used to like reading plays. What made the book difficult was how characters went through changes and did things without much motivation. I didn't find much consistency in any of the characters other than the children. I found them to be delightful and their scenes were the best in the book. It was as if all those children in the stories I grew up with were placed in a household with normal, less-than-perfect parents.
Of the commentary I read, Horace Lamb is referred to as a sadist who is suddenly motivated to change his ways. Quite frankly, I wonder how anyone could read the book and slap him with the label of sadist. He's a man who is dependent on his wife's money. She loves her children far more than she loves him. He has grown to be miserly and controlling. However, a sadist inflicts pain for his own pleasure. If Horace ever caused anyone physical pain, I didn't catch it. He was very strict and punitive with his children, but he was acting in what I believe he thought was the children's best interest. He thought he was making them better people. They were afraid of his anger, not physical punishment. I don't think he was much different than many fathers throughout the ages.
The scenes with the servants were the most confusing. George was a real puzzle and his actions at the end didn't make any sense based on his attitudes throughout the book. The Doubleday family also didn't make sense, especially the way they just disappeared from the story.
I primarily gave this book 3 stars because of the scenes with the Lamb children. I think Compton-Burnett could have done a great job of writing a story focused just on them. It would be a fractured version of Five Little Peppers and How They Grew or Little Women with dysfunctional parents instead of perfect parents and well-suited to the 21st Century.
I kept hearing that this novel is difficult to read because it's almost all dialogue. I didn't find it difficult for that reason. Reading Manservant and Maidservant was very much like reading a play. I used to like reading plays. What made the book difficult was how characters went through changes and did things without much motivation. I didn't find much consistency in any of the characters other than the children. I found them to be delightful and their scenes were the best in the book. It was as if all those children in the stories I grew up with were placed in a household with normal, less-than-perfect parents.
Of the commentary I read, Horace Lamb is referred to as a sadist who is suddenly motivated to change his ways. Quite frankly, I wonder how anyone could read the book and slap him with the label of sadist. He's a man who is dependent on his wife's money. She loves her children far more than she loves him. He has grown to be miserly and controlling. However, a sadist inflicts pain for his own pleasure. If Horace ever caused anyone physical pain, I didn't catch it. He was very strict and punitive with his children, but he was acting in what I believe he thought was the children's best interest. He thought he was making them better people. They were afraid of his anger, not physical punishment. I don't think he was much different than many fathers throughout the ages.
The scenes with the servants were the most confusing. George was a real puzzle and his actions at the end didn't make any sense based on his attitudes throughout the book. The Doubleday family also didn't make sense, especially the way they just disappeared from the story.
I primarily gave this book 3 stars because of the scenes with the Lamb children. I think Compton-Burnett could have done a great job of writing a story focused just on them. It would be a fractured version of Five Little Peppers and How They Grew or Little Women with dysfunctional parents instead of perfect parents and well-suited to the 21st Century.
May 2, 2014
This book is extremely odd, and far more difficult than I had expected. It took longer and required much more sustained attention than I thought it would.
Other reviewers have described the dialog (and the book is nearly entirely dialog) as "stilted"; I can see what they mean, but I think this is the case only because the characters' lives are also stilted. With the exception of George, who shows rountine signs of both emotion and wild inappropriateness, the characters seem to be able to do terrible things but unable to say them. I think this is what gives the book its odd character, and it is also its strength.
This portrait of family life also makes a nice change from the various forms of glamour and romanticism found in the something like Downtown Abbey (or, in another way, the various Brontë novels). Nothing is romantic here, not even the most violent, horrifying, or potentially titillating of events. In fact, the gap between the nature of the plot and the language in which its events are expressed is striking and, I think, extremely interesting.
Other reviewers have described the dialog (and the book is nearly entirely dialog) as "stilted"; I can see what they mean, but I think this is the case only because the characters' lives are also stilted. With the exception of George, who shows rountine signs of both emotion and wild inappropriateness, the characters seem to be able to do terrible things but unable to say them. I think this is what gives the book its odd character, and it is also its strength.
This portrait of family life also makes a nice change from the various forms of glamour and romanticism found in the something like Downtown Abbey (or, in another way, the various Brontë novels). Nothing is romantic here, not even the most violent, horrifying, or potentially titillating of events. In fact, the gap between the nature of the plot and the language in which its events are expressed is striking and, I think, extremely interesting.
January 4, 2022
Apro il 2022 con una lettura che non mi ha soddisfatta pienamente.
"Servo e serva" sicuramente si rivela un'ottima rappresentazione dei rapporti sociali e gerarchici tra differenti classi (tra "upstairs" e "downstairs" per dirla alla Downton Abbey), ma anche all'interno di una stessa classe, sia tra i servi, sia tra il capofamiglia e gli altri componenti. I dialoghi ben costruiti, vivaci e molto ironici sono il punto forte della lettura, che tocca en passant diversi temi significativi (tra i tanti, l'analfabetismo). Alcune frasi le ho segnate perché mi hanno colpita, non posso negarlo.
Tuttavia, la trama appare troppo "inconsistente", debole, alcuni episodi si trascinano per troppo tempo mentre altri compaiono all'improvviso. Il risultato è quello di una lettura che si fa fatica a portare a termine, nonostante le sue appena 275 pagine.
Consigliato come rappresentazione sociale, ma la noia che ho avvertito a livello soggettivo nel complesso mi impediscono di assegnare un punteggio più alto.
Due stelle e mezza arrotondato a tre.
"Servo e serva" sicuramente si rivela un'ottima rappresentazione dei rapporti sociali e gerarchici tra differenti classi (tra "upstairs" e "downstairs" per dirla alla Downton Abbey), ma anche all'interno di una stessa classe, sia tra i servi, sia tra il capofamiglia e gli altri componenti. I dialoghi ben costruiti, vivaci e molto ironici sono il punto forte della lettura, che tocca en passant diversi temi significativi (tra i tanti, l'analfabetismo). Alcune frasi le ho segnate perché mi hanno colpita, non posso negarlo.
Tuttavia, la trama appare troppo "inconsistente", debole, alcuni episodi si trascinano per troppo tempo mentre altri compaiono all'improvviso. Il risultato è quello di una lettura che si fa fatica a portare a termine, nonostante le sue appena 275 pagine.
Consigliato come rappresentazione sociale, ma la noia che ho avvertito a livello soggettivo nel complesso mi impediscono di assegnare un punteggio più alto.
Due stelle e mezza arrotondato a tre.
August 4, 2023
Istnieje spore prawdopodobieństwo, że Ivy Compton – Burnett zasiała ziarno, które wzeszło u Juliana Fellowes’a i zaowocowało Downton Abbey, bo czytając najlepszy (zdaniem krytyki) tytuł brytyjskiej powieściopisarki trudno nie mieć luźnych skojarzeń z hitem serialowym ITV. Stylistyka powieści utrzymana jest w konwencji comedy of manners, która w ogóle nie wchodzi w dialog sama ze sobą, a dialog jest sztandarowym metrum warsztatu autorki. Role zostały dawno rozdane: mamy tyranizującą krewnych głowę rodziny, udręczoną żonę, ubogiego krewnego żyjącego na garnuszku, zdewociałą kucharkę, głupiutką gąskę robiącą za służącą, krnąbrnego młokosa i czuwającego na posterunku starego majordomusa, który jest w stanie wybrnąć z każdej kłopotliwej sytuacji. Cięta riposta i cierpka ironia, będące emblematami twórczości Compton – Burnett, dość szybko okazują się być męczące z powodu ich nadreprezentacji w tekście, przeładowanym dialogami do granic możliwości. Pisarka prawie w ogóle nie korzysta z trzecioosobowej narracji, wszystkie kwestie wkładając w usta swych bohaterów, mimo że część z nich znakomicie mógłby zagospodarować wszstkowiedzący narrator jako komentator poszczególnych zachowań i poczynań dramatis personae. W dość sprawnie napisanym posłowiu tłumacz powieści, Marcin Szuster, określił tę powieść jako dramat bez didaskaliów i to sformułowanie dobrze oddaje to, z czym czytelnik musi się mierzyć. A przychodzi mu mierzyć się z nieustającym fechtunkiem werbalnym, z kakofonią kolejno narastających w tempie geometrycznym dialogów, w ogromie których te riposty i cierpkie porównania nikną i bardzo szybko powszednieją. Z czytaniem tej powieści jest jak z oglądaniem zawodów solistów podczas MŚ w łyżwiarstwie figurowym: przy pierwszym poczwórnym axlu człowiek jest zachwycony, przy kolejnym poczwórnym skoku zbiera szczękę z podłogi, ale dziesiąty z kolei poczwórny skok powszednieje na tyle, że zamiast klaskać, wzruszamy ramionami.
Paradoksalnie te nieliczne momenty powieściowe, w których głos zostaje oddany narratorowi były dla mnie najciekawsze, być może z powodu paralel między stylem narracji zastosowanym przez Compton – Burnett z tym wykorzystywanym przez Edith Wharton. Do zmęczenia lekturą przyczynia się nie tylko nadreprezentacja dialogów, ale również stylizacja językowa: koturnowa, napuszona, pompatyczna, jednym słowem – kampowa. Wszyscy bohaterowie są „przegięci” językowo, posługując się zmanierowaną, bufońską, afektowaną angielszczyzną zupełnie nieadekwatną do sytuacji językowej. W mniejszych dawkach taki zabieg wywołuje efekt komiczny, ale w większej dawce – a przez większą mam na myśli ponad 400 stron gęsto wypełnionych dialogami – wywołuje efekt odwrotny do zamierzonego. Z biogramu autorki wyczytałem, że edukację zakończyła stopniem z języka łacińskiego. Szkoda, że w twórczości własnej nie skorzystała z Horacjańskiego złotego środka, gdyż umiar jest tym, czego tej powieści brakuje.
Paradoksalnie te nieliczne momenty powieściowe, w których głos zostaje oddany narratorowi były dla mnie najciekawsze, być może z powodu paralel między stylem narracji zastosowanym przez Compton – Burnett z tym wykorzystywanym przez Edith Wharton. Do zmęczenia lekturą przyczynia się nie tylko nadreprezentacja dialogów, ale również stylizacja językowa: koturnowa, napuszona, pompatyczna, jednym słowem – kampowa. Wszyscy bohaterowie są „przegięci” językowo, posługując się zmanierowaną, bufońską, afektowaną angielszczyzną zupełnie nieadekwatną do sytuacji językowej. W mniejszych dawkach taki zabieg wywołuje efekt komiczny, ale w większej dawce – a przez większą mam na myśli ponad 400 stron gęsto wypełnionych dialogami – wywołuje efekt odwrotny do zamierzonego. Z biogramu autorki wyczytałem, że edukację zakończyła stopniem z języka łacińskiego. Szkoda, że w twórczości własnej nie skorzystała z Horacjańskiego złotego środka, gdyż umiar jest tym, czego tej powieści brakuje.
May 13, 2011
This book, first published in 1947, is set at least 50 years earlier and focuses narrowly on one family with a rather tyrannical father, their neglected children, their servants, and a very small number of friends. The story is mainly told through dialogue and that, with the limited number of characters and settings, makes it seem almost like reading a play. The dialogue is clever in a witty way and requires a certain amount of concentration.
I liked it a lot and I think I will enjoy more of her books. It's a pity they are now out of fashion and some are out of print.
I liked it a lot and I think I will enjoy more of her books. It's a pity they are now out of fashion and some are out of print.
September 17, 2025
up there with the strangest novels I've read. her dialogue is so expressive and expansive - never remotely naturalistic but everything is so unnervingly sharp and portentous. found the plot baffling but so deeply rooted in the internal logic of the book that you go with it
October 26, 2010
i wish i could say i liked this more than i did. compton-burnett's novel is very like a play. it is evident that she has a very strong command of the english language, and of dialogue, but it was not enough to carry the book, which left me cold. the bottom line, as it often is, is that i didn't like the people in this book. i didn't like horace, the patriarch/bully at the centre of the piece, i didn't like mortimer, his milque-toast cousin and would-be cuckold, or horace's wife charlotte, or their children -- so much for the family at the core of the book -- there is also a barely significant aunt emilia too. now to lamb family satellites: i didn't like bullivant the butler, or george the footman, or the cook mrs. selden, or the maid, miriam.. that's almost everybody in this book (there are the tutor and his mother, the doubledays, and a shop lady with an irrelevant secret that changes nothing on revelation) and basically everybody in the book is at least partly an asshole, and their voices are rarely distinguishable -- the children speak as the adults do, and the lower class as the upper class do -- all in compton-burnett's arch voice. i couldn't tell you that the dialogue reveals any character. the introduction to my copy, by a woman named penelope lively, lauds the characterization but i don't see it -- unless it is an archetypal characterization, or stereotype: upper-class fathers are like this, and upper-class young men who do not marry well are like that, children of the upper-class are monsters and martyrs, and lower class servants out of the workhouse must inevitably think to relieve their suffering by trying to set up fatal accidents. it gets two stars for the virtuosity of dialogue; so much as it succeeds in propelling along a plot-less story spun around a masochistic and loveless family of jerks.
April 14, 2022
A distanza di pagine e pagine lette, vi confesso che Ivy Compton Burnett è una delle mie autrici preferite: sa essere geniale e spietata come nessun'altra, e la sua sagacia è una vera rarità.
La lettura del suo ultimo romanzo pubblicato mi ha riconfermato tutto: indubbiamente, si è rivelato il mio preferito dell'autrice.
A tirare le redini di casa Lamb, è Horace, capofamiglia e padre tiranno, anche abbastanza avaro: pur vivendo solo grazie ai soldi di sua moglie Charlotte, trova sempre il modo di risparmiare su tutto; se i suoi bambini soffrono il freddo e la fame, semplicemente, a lui non importa. Però quando Charlotte è costretta ad allontanarsi dalla dimora, l'equilibrio tra i familiari inizia a cedere causando una serie di piccoli "incidenti". Ed è proprio in questo clima di sotterfugi, dispetti e battibecchi che la servitù assume un ruolo fondamentale.
In "Servo e serva", Ivy Compton Burnett ci offre il ritratto di una famiglia inglese di fine 800. Come negli altri suoi romanzi, anche qui è chiaro a chi è indirizzata la sua critica: attraverso brevi spaccati di vita, analizza gli aspetti meno piacevoli di una comune società patriarcale e borghese.
L'autrice ne evidenzia la superficialità e l'ipocrisia, li spoglia delle maschere che indossano ogni giorno e sotto le quali nascondono pregiudizi e cattiverie verso chi non ritengono al loro stesso posto nella gerarchia sociale; approfondisce i rapporti familiari e sociali attraverso una narrazione unica, che è il suo enorme punto di forza. Di fatto, "Servo e serva", così come gli altri suoi romanzi, si distinguono per gli scambi di battute arguti, pungenti e tanto ricchi di brio da sembrare un film.
La lettura del suo ultimo romanzo pubblicato mi ha riconfermato tutto: indubbiamente, si è rivelato il mio preferito dell'autrice.
A tirare le redini di casa Lamb, è Horace, capofamiglia e padre tiranno, anche abbastanza avaro: pur vivendo solo grazie ai soldi di sua moglie Charlotte, trova sempre il modo di risparmiare su tutto; se i suoi bambini soffrono il freddo e la fame, semplicemente, a lui non importa. Però quando Charlotte è costretta ad allontanarsi dalla dimora, l'equilibrio tra i familiari inizia a cedere causando una serie di piccoli "incidenti". Ed è proprio in questo clima di sotterfugi, dispetti e battibecchi che la servitù assume un ruolo fondamentale.
In "Servo e serva", Ivy Compton Burnett ci offre il ritratto di una famiglia inglese di fine 800. Come negli altri suoi romanzi, anche qui è chiaro a chi è indirizzata la sua critica: attraverso brevi spaccati di vita, analizza gli aspetti meno piacevoli di una comune società patriarcale e borghese.
L'autrice ne evidenzia la superficialità e l'ipocrisia, li spoglia delle maschere che indossano ogni giorno e sotto le quali nascondono pregiudizi e cattiverie verso chi non ritengono al loro stesso posto nella gerarchia sociale; approfondisce i rapporti familiari e sociali attraverso una narrazione unica, che è il suo enorme punto di forza. Di fatto, "Servo e serva", così come gli altri suoi romanzi, si distinguono per gli scambi di battute arguti, pungenti e tanto ricchi di brio da sembrare un film.
March 19, 2020
I think it was not the right time for me to read this, I have con confess I skipped through a lot of it. Maybe this british rhetoric, o the irony that goes through the whole book just was not what I need to read right now. I might give it a try again when there not a worldwide pandemic blocking everything.
April 20, 2020
A bewildering novel by a bewildering author. Perhaps my own impression was only 3 stars but I feel I must award a 4th for sheer success of concept.
As other reviewers have summarised, Horace Lamb is a dismissive, uncaring gentleman from an era long past, whose wife can't stand him, servants find unappealing (when they're not outright attempting to kill him), and whose children seem to have grown old before their time. (If I take nothing from this, it will be a desire to use such names as Avery, Tamasin, and Jasper for any future unlucky children I may sire!). Horace's turning point is discovering how everyone feels about him, leading to an attempted change of personality, juxtaposed with the minor antics of his extended household.
This is my first Compton-Burnett novel and it seems clear that plot, as such, is not at the top of her priority list. This is a conversational novel, and a stylised one at that. Writing between the wars (i.e. long after the Victorian and Edwardian eras she depicts), Compton-Burnett creates a highly artificial, ironic world in which prose and narrative voice are sparse, and dialogue must carry the day. From the housekeeper to the youngest child, everyone's speech is arch, poisonous, and proverbial. (A tone once described by Hal Prince, of his musical A Little Night Music as being "knives dipped in icing sugar".) It feels almost like the achievement of pointillist painting, where the eye makes the colours mingle; here, the reader must make the dialogue serve for all of the other parts of writing too. "Charlotte", says Horace at one point," I have not spoken to you of the thing that is between us. It may be that I shall not speak of it." Elsewhere, to quote the character of Gideon, "My feelings are not easy; they go deep like everything about me."
Everything both high and ironic, rather like the older way of translating the Greek tragedies.
This structure has clearly confused a range of readers here on Goodreads, who have decided that Ms Compton-Burnett can't have known what she was doing. "No-one speaks like that!" cries a popular refrain, which suggests these armchair critics have never read Austen or Dickens, Pynchon or Hardy, and yet have somehow progressed to this obscure novelist from the early 20th century.
It will surprise no-one to hear that this book is hard-going. I think Ms Compton-Burnett, whose personal history you should also look up, was hard-going in general. Yet I'm glad to have finally made my way through one of her volumes. This is a book that almost cries out to be read aloud, with the subtleties of dialogue somewhat lost over the generations but still an intriguing experiment if nothing else. Will you enjoy it? If you enjoy extreme stylisation and narrative playfulness, perhaps yes. In the NYRB Classics edition, Diane Johnson's introduction refers to Manservant and Maidservant as a "noir version" of the British drama series Upstairs, Downstairs. It's a deeply strange comparison but, I think, rather apt.
As other reviewers have summarised, Horace Lamb is a dismissive, uncaring gentleman from an era long past, whose wife can't stand him, servants find unappealing (when they're not outright attempting to kill him), and whose children seem to have grown old before their time. (If I take nothing from this, it will be a desire to use such names as Avery, Tamasin, and Jasper for any future unlucky children I may sire!). Horace's turning point is discovering how everyone feels about him, leading to an attempted change of personality, juxtaposed with the minor antics of his extended household.
This is my first Compton-Burnett novel and it seems clear that plot, as such, is not at the top of her priority list. This is a conversational novel, and a stylised one at that. Writing between the wars (i.e. long after the Victorian and Edwardian eras she depicts), Compton-Burnett creates a highly artificial, ironic world in which prose and narrative voice are sparse, and dialogue must carry the day. From the housekeeper to the youngest child, everyone's speech is arch, poisonous, and proverbial. (A tone once described by Hal Prince, of his musical A Little Night Music as being "knives dipped in icing sugar".) It feels almost like the achievement of pointillist painting, where the eye makes the colours mingle; here, the reader must make the dialogue serve for all of the other parts of writing too. "Charlotte", says Horace at one point," I have not spoken to you of the thing that is between us. It may be that I shall not speak of it." Elsewhere, to quote the character of Gideon, "My feelings are not easy; they go deep like everything about me."
Everything both high and ironic, rather like the older way of translating the Greek tragedies.
This structure has clearly confused a range of readers here on Goodreads, who have decided that Ms Compton-Burnett can't have known what she was doing. "No-one speaks like that!" cries a popular refrain, which suggests these armchair critics have never read Austen or Dickens, Pynchon or Hardy, and yet have somehow progressed to this obscure novelist from the early 20th century.
It will surprise no-one to hear that this book is hard-going. I think Ms Compton-Burnett, whose personal history you should also look up, was hard-going in general. Yet I'm glad to have finally made my way through one of her volumes. This is a book that almost cries out to be read aloud, with the subtleties of dialogue somewhat lost over the generations but still an intriguing experiment if nothing else. Will you enjoy it? If you enjoy extreme stylisation and narrative playfulness, perhaps yes. In the NYRB Classics edition, Diane Johnson's introduction refers to Manservant and Maidservant as a "noir version" of the British drama series Upstairs, Downstairs. It's a deeply strange comparison but, I think, rather apt.
October 30, 2016
This is my first encounter with the author Ivy Compton-Burnett, after having meant to read her for years (decades, really). My colleague Andrea C. had read it and warned me it was odd, and she was right. The structural feature that makes it unusual is that the story is predominantly told in dialogue, which does take some getting used to -- though after a while, you do, or at least, I did (Andrea said the same, so don't let that feature put you off). It's almost, but not quite, like reading a play.
The story strikes me as a cross between Downton Abbey and the plays of Joe Orton, and if you know anything about Joe Orton, you know that means this is a strange book. (If you don't know anything about Joe Orton, get the collected plays immediately, he was brilliant and funny!)
I was expecting a kind of creepy commentary on Victorian life (though the author was writing years after that era), and that's what I got. But it was so well done, I am inclined to read more of her work.
The story strikes me as a cross between Downton Abbey and the plays of Joe Orton, and if you know anything about Joe Orton, you know that means this is a strange book. (If you don't know anything about Joe Orton, get the collected plays immediately, he was brilliant and funny!)
I was expecting a kind of creepy commentary on Victorian life (though the author was writing years after that era), and that's what I got. But it was so well done, I am inclined to read more of her work.
March 13, 2016
Although set in Victorian England and written by an author who lived through the Victorian period, there's very little about Manservant and Maidservant that's Victorian. The characters, true, talk like they're all Oscar Wilde, but Compton-Burnett clearly sees right past their facades. Nobody ever means what they say here, and everyone has skeletons in their closets (or out in the open). Although it can get a bit hard to follow if you don't pay attention, Manservant and Maidservant is masterfully executed and clearly had an influence on authors like Henry Green and possibly William Gaddis.
December 3, 2014
Com'è che nessuno legge la signorina Ivy Compton-Burnett? Ho letto questo libro in tre giorni esatti. Un libro fatto tutto di dialoghi serratissimi, di aforismi lancinanti, un libro perfetto e di grande cinismo e cattiveria. E' leggera, allegra velocissima e nello stesso tempo intrisa di pessimismo cosmico. A tratti ricorda Beckett e Jonesco. Com'è che nessuno legge Ivy Compton-Burnett? Appena trovo un altro libro lo compro. Ne ha scritti 18 e io sono solo al primo. Che fortuna!
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March 24, 2025DNF
I want to read as much ICB as possible because I know how much Elizabeth Taylor loved her and her books, but I'm afraid I can't deal with this right now. I'm sure there'll come a time when I'll be in the mood for 300 pages of people being exquisitely mean to each other, but not today.
I want to read as much ICB as possible because I know how much Elizabeth Taylor loved her and her books, but I'm afraid I can't deal with this right now. I'm sure there'll come a time when I'll be in the mood for 300 pages of people being exquisitely mean to each other, but not today.
September 2, 2022
Boy, I would hate to be the head of the house in an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel. Eerily creepy but hilarious. A House And Its Head is next. And I feel similar having started it last night.
December 18, 2012
A professor of English suggested that I read Ivy Compton-Burnett for an example of how to conjure setting through dialogue. Having done so, I'm not sure I understand what he meant. It's written almost entirely in complex, stilted dialogue, almost as if the characters are making speeches on stage. The settings were sketchily evoked and hardly mattered. The interplay between the characters is interesting, but the story creaks. I felt it needed actors to bring it to life - to decide whether to play it for laughs or for pathos.
The introduction says: '...rooted in Victorian literature, especially the late Victorian theatre, ... her stylised repartee can remind of Oscar Wilde and is more directly the forbear of, say, Harold Pinter than of the British novels of today... the effect is almost like a transcript... she allows most of her characters extreme literalness... her novels, seemingly so stylised, were more realistic than they seem and must have borne considerable resemblance to the facts of her life.'
For myself, I couldn't make up my mind if she was breaking the literary rules on purpose, experimentally, or writing naively without knowledge of them. Rather fascinating, but one is enough for me.
The introduction says: '...rooted in Victorian literature, especially the late Victorian theatre, ... her stylised repartee can remind of Oscar Wilde and is more directly the forbear of, say, Harold Pinter than of the British novels of today... the effect is almost like a transcript... she allows most of her characters extreme literalness... her novels, seemingly so stylised, were more realistic than they seem and must have borne considerable resemblance to the facts of her life.'
For myself, I couldn't make up my mind if she was breaking the literary rules on purpose, experimentally, or writing naively without knowledge of them. Rather fascinating, but one is enough for me.
May 13, 2011
I have always been curious about Ivy Compton-Burnett becuase of the descriptions of her work as a dark cynical wit, stripping bare the pretensions of her time. When I finally sat down to read Manservant and Maidservant I was expecting something along the lines of Saki and was sadly disapointed. Essentially everything takes place in an on the surface humdrum fashion with dark undercurrants revealed layer by layer in the dialogue between the various characters who all regardless of age, gender or background speak like undergraduates showing off to their friends. Actually reading that last sentence it does not sound so bad and I suspect that someone a little more sophisticated and subtle than me might enjoy the book a great deal. For myself the main pleasure I got from this book was ticking it off my to read shelf.
July 26, 2019
Lo primero que leo de esta escritora y no creo que vaya a repetir. A priori lo que cuenta me interesa pero su estilo no me llega, no he empatizado con los personajes y se me ha hecho muy cuesta arriba. Toda la novela está construida a base de diâlogos y cada capitulo es una escena de gente hablando de una forma muy artificial y fria, la calidez brilla por su ausencia y llegado un punto hasta pensé en abandonarlo. Una decepción.
June 26, 2022
Upstairs/downstairs shenanigans, with a few other characters thrown in, with pot-boilery plot elements that don't really amount to much, but rescued by the astonishing stylised dialogue, which sometimes goes a bit too far (nobody has ever actually talked like this), but pushes this up from 2.5-3 star territory to 3.5 and rounding up!
January 6, 2021
I had high hopes for this book but found it too annoying to continue reading. All the heavy lifting of the story is carried by the dialog, and I didn't particularly like the dialog. Compton-Burnett is not very good at distinguishing her characters from one another, which makes for a confusing read.
June 17, 2019
Sort of interesting, reading this immediately following reading Peter Ackroyd's Dominion, his survey of Victorian England, particularly his contention that Victorian wives had far less agency than Victorian widows and spinsters. This story expatiates on the parallel dominions of two men; Horace Lamb, the paterfamilias, and Bullivant, the butler, and how they rule their discrete realms in the same household. Much dialogue, hardly any narrative: the whole tending towards claustrophobia.
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February 20, 2024The characters of Mortimer (brother to the novel's 'house tyrant') and Bullivant (a gentleman's gentleman of [mostly] good-willed intelligence) keep this novel from being as bleak as its immediate predecessor. Logically, given the title, more time is spent 'below stairs' in this one, and the various servants are developed in greater than average detail. There is also a great sense in this novel that things might have been a lot worse and that patience, allowed to filter some common sense through it, might actually allow situations to be resolved for the better.
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