What do you think?
Rate this book
Darcy Dancer #2
Leila: Further in the Life and Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman
His future is disastrous, his present indecent, his past divine. He is Darcy Dancer, youthful squire of Andromeda Park, the great gray stone mansion inhabited by Crooks, the cross eyed butler, and the sexy, aristocratic Miss Von B. This sequel to The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman finds our hero falling in with decidedly low company — like the dissolute Dublin poet, Foxy Slattery, and Ronald Rashers, who absconds with the family silver — before falling head over heels in love with the lissome Leila.
420 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
8 people are currently reading
72 people want to read
About the author
J.P. Donleavy
49 books207 followersJames Patrick Donleavy was an Irish American author, born to Irish immigrants. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II after which he moved to Ireland. In 1946 he began studies at Trinity College, Dublin, but left before taking a degree. He was first published in the Dublin literary periodical, Envoy.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.P._Don...
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.P._Don...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 8, 2014
Note: This a discovered review of mine from a 2012 read not previously posted
I loved the balance between satire and low comedy and mix of tragedy with romance in this tale of a recently orphaned young man of the landed gentry in a boggy rural area outside of Dublin. The time interval is sometime soon after World War 2, though it might as well be the 19th century as electricity has not arrived at the 1,000 acre estate, and the household clings to the to the last remnants of feudal aristocracy. This untenable mode of existence is milked for comedy at every point and only a few characters escape being portrayed as absurdly insane, alcoholic, greedy, or hypersexual parodies. Amid this we get young Darcy as thoughtful and kind hearted, but bumbling and blind; he is inspired by unrequited love for a new maid, but driven by lusts to pursuing compromising sexual exploits that get him into trouble.
At the beginning, Darcy has come of age and assumes his lonely position as master of the estate with about a half-dozen servants. Step by step he comes to learn his inheritance and way of life are under threat of physical and economic collapse. As in a cross among Wodehouse and Monty Python, we are treated to wonderfully madcap escapades wrought by Darcy’s inept management of the unmanageable servants. The butler is an unforgettable combination of dignity and absurdity, and a scene where a maid serves ice cream with a lamb gravy sauce had me in stitches (especially when a guest Marquis requests the recipe). Darcy’s social life centers on the foxhunting crowd, which includes titled aristocrats, con men, and some colorful social climbing women, including several who take advantage of him in one way or another. The spoofing of the foxhunts sometimes sends the narrative over the top into drastic mayhem of falls and fights.
The arrival of Darcy’s cruel sisters, come for husband hunting in this crowd, steps up the pace of chaotic disasters and confrontations. The only way Darcy appears to keep his sanity is to dwell on the new maid Leila, whose beauty, grace, and lively mind captivates his heart; yet her reticence leads him to alternative targets for his lust. At low point, Darcy ends up nearly broke with a horseracing crowd in Dublin with a bent for boozing and fornication. Despite sexuality infusing Darcy’s consciousness on effectively every page, there is a sweet pathos surrounding his rare success in his pursuits.
The novel is on the long side and a bit claustrophobic about the world Darcy seems to be trapped in, with its apparently infinite supply of things that can go wrong. It is a sequel an earlier volume about Darcy’s upbringing (which I didn’t read) and a more serious opus compared to Donleavy’s “The Ginger Man” and “Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B” (both of which I found delightful). I love his style of breaking a sentence into punctuated thought and his approach to ending every chapter with a Haiku-like set of short lines. For example:
Hopelessness comes.
My heart sinking with the hay cut.
I drew the curtains across the tinted pink glass panes.
And beat and beat the walls with my fists.
But as a certain horse may have character for hunting:
So it must be
That one has
A soul
For despair
I loved the balance between satire and low comedy and mix of tragedy with romance in this tale of a recently orphaned young man of the landed gentry in a boggy rural area outside of Dublin. The time interval is sometime soon after World War 2, though it might as well be the 19th century as electricity has not arrived at the 1,000 acre estate, and the household clings to the to the last remnants of feudal aristocracy. This untenable mode of existence is milked for comedy at every point and only a few characters escape being portrayed as absurdly insane, alcoholic, greedy, or hypersexual parodies. Amid this we get young Darcy as thoughtful and kind hearted, but bumbling and blind; he is inspired by unrequited love for a new maid, but driven by lusts to pursuing compromising sexual exploits that get him into trouble.
At the beginning, Darcy has come of age and assumes his lonely position as master of the estate with about a half-dozen servants. Step by step he comes to learn his inheritance and way of life are under threat of physical and economic collapse. As in a cross among Wodehouse and Monty Python, we are treated to wonderfully madcap escapades wrought by Darcy’s inept management of the unmanageable servants. The butler is an unforgettable combination of dignity and absurdity, and a scene where a maid serves ice cream with a lamb gravy sauce had me in stitches (especially when a guest Marquis requests the recipe). Darcy’s social life centers on the foxhunting crowd, which includes titled aristocrats, con men, and some colorful social climbing women, including several who take advantage of him in one way or another. The spoofing of the foxhunts sometimes sends the narrative over the top into drastic mayhem of falls and fights.
The arrival of Darcy’s cruel sisters, come for husband hunting in this crowd, steps up the pace of chaotic disasters and confrontations. The only way Darcy appears to keep his sanity is to dwell on the new maid Leila, whose beauty, grace, and lively mind captivates his heart; yet her reticence leads him to alternative targets for his lust. At low point, Darcy ends up nearly broke with a horseracing crowd in Dublin with a bent for boozing and fornication. Despite sexuality infusing Darcy’s consciousness on effectively every page, there is a sweet pathos surrounding his rare success in his pursuits.
The novel is on the long side and a bit claustrophobic about the world Darcy seems to be trapped in, with its apparently infinite supply of things that can go wrong. It is a sequel an earlier volume about Darcy’s upbringing (which I didn’t read) and a more serious opus compared to Donleavy’s “The Ginger Man” and “Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B” (both of which I found delightful). I love his style of breaking a sentence into punctuated thought and his approach to ending every chapter with a Haiku-like set of short lines. For example:
Hopelessness comes.
My heart sinking with the hay cut.
I drew the curtains across the tinted pink glass panes.
And beat and beat the walls with my fists.
But as a certain horse may have character for hunting:
So it must be
That one has
A soul
For despair
December 17, 2017
Probably my favourite Donleavy novel - and I've read most of them at least once - certainly close to 'A Fairy Tale of New York' in its scope and tragicomic weight. Funny, ridiculous, infuriating, sad, ribald, politically incorrect (at least by 21st Century standards), in Darcy Dancer J.P. created one of his most memorable and believable protagonists; a touchingly generous, flawed and gullible man who, in this second book devoted to his catastrophic life and adventures, falls in love with an enigmatic and beautiful servant with a chequered past. Although Donleavy's inexplicable hatred of question marks, hyphens, semicolons (and occasionally even commas) grates at times and make some of his sentences unnecessarily cumbersome, this is a thoroughly enjoyable and unforgettable book. I almost want to go straight back to Chapter One and start again. Definitely one to reread.
May 4, 2018
Raucous, riotous, ribald, profane, hilarious, sad, and I could easily add a dozen or more adjectives to describe this marvelous sequel to the first Darcy Dancer novel. If anything, it is better than its predecessor. The perpetually aroused Darcy meets his Beatrice in the form of the eponymous servant girl, but alas, much like his fortune, she recedes just out of his reach as his aging manor, his inept and somewhat dishonest servant staff, his grifting friends and his slapstick misfortunes collapse, bungle, steal, and discomfit our hero throughout this novel. The word-play is first-rate, and the scene in the Dublin bacchanal followed by Darcy's sexual mishap at the chiropodist's office are simply jaw-dropping in their intensity and vividness. This is a most entertaining read.
February 21, 2025
Couldn’t help but draw comparison to the onion eaters which I generally thought was better until the last act. Written from a similar place and theme. The humanity of this novel shone. Final act of the book was absolutely touching.
November 20, 2022
The sequel. Almost as entertaining as the first. Darcy turns out to be a bit of an underachiever, keeps lowbrow company, and is far too tolerant of his recalcitrant staff.
October 29, 2017
The second in the Darcy Dancer trilogy. If you've read anything by the now-dead master Donleavy, you know what to expect in this one: dirty humour and romantic pursuits written in a beautifully evocative way only he can do.
October 9, 2012
A longtime favoutite.
September 6, 2014
Intensely annoying. Is there no more to this man's world than social status, money and his penis? Kind of like a blueprint for American Psycho. Brilliant in its persistence.
April 8, 2016
Not as funny as first but entertaining. Loses money on horses, house is falling down around him, servants steal drink from cellar and eat too much butter! All the old characters return.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews