Back at the beginning of April, I talked about how much I had enjoyed listening to Elizabeth Jan Howard's The Light Years, the first volume in a saga recounting the multi-generational Cazalet family. Since then I've listened to the rest. 

The original four books of the series succeeded each other at a brisk pace (The Light Years in 1990, Marking Time in 1991, Confusion in 1993, and Casting Off in 1995). Their narrative starts in 1937, and take us through the next 10 years -- through the lead-up to World War II, through the war itself, and into the very new post-war peace. Then, in 2013 (a full 18 years later, therefore), came All Change, a fifth volume, published when Howard was 90. This leaps forward to 1956, and takes us to the end of 1958.

Whereas the original quartet is excellent, I was less impressed by the laggard fifth.


The Cazalet Chronicles close with the family leaving the place they had all at some point called home. So my pictures are also of homes in England that I have left







Marking Time

Historian and historical novelist James Holland thinks this is the best book of the series: "It is steeped in authenticity. It all feels right... I love historical fiction, but it has to be right."

It is aptly named. So many characters are waiting for something. Waiting to be "old enough" -- old enough to run their own lives, old enough to know what reproduction is all about, old enough to talk about death, old enough to sign up to fight... Waiting for the "right man". Waiting to see whether the cancer will re-emerge. Waiting for news about missing people. Most of all, waiting for the war to be over...

It's like now, but much, much, much worse: life on hold, as we pace on the spot, our possibilities reduced to almost nothing. For them this all dragged on for six interminable years.

And how hard they worked now, these posh people, even in their privileged positions. There are shortages of everything, including manpower. Everyone has to chip in. Everyone has to make do. Everything is time-consuming: rounding up rationed food, growing extra food, mending and repairing, doing at home what would once have been done for you.

Old emotional habits are dying hard, however. Edward, the second Cazalet son and the husband of Viola, has grown even sleazier (aside from his regular mistress, Diana, there's a fling with a young servicewoman, and his inappropriate attention to Louise, his daughter, continues, although Louise's knowledge of his affair with Diana gives her a restraining hold over him). Viola has grown even colder towards Louise.







Broken or incomplete relationships are a recurring motif. There are the sisters, Viola and Jessica, both inexplicably besotted with the puffed-up "Lorenzo". There's Angela (Jessica's oldest daughter) and that sleazeball at the BBC; there's family friend Archibald, who used to love Rachel, who didn't love him; there's Sid (Margot Sidney), who still loves Rachel, and is loved in return, but so often pushed aside because of Rachel's "selflessness" towards her family.  There's Diana, who for some reason loves the duplicitous Edward, and dangles on and on, waiting for him to make some sort of decision. 

And there's the death of one of the two unmarried great-aunts. In life the sisters endlessly bickered, but the one left behind is genuinely bereft. 

Louise is being courted by painter Michael Hadleigh, another in the long line of Cazalet relationships that feature young women and substantially older men. This motif will only get stronger.

One of the most interesting sets of characters in the whole series is Louise's friend Stella and her family. Jewish, intellectual, talented, informed, and loquacious, they have a home life that offers a welcome contrast to the restrained, sometimes bland interactions of the Cazalets.   











Confusion

This opens just after the death of Sybil, wife of eldest Cazalet son Hugh. So the cancer returned... Rupert, the youngest son, has been missing since the Dunkerque evacuation. Polly and Clary, the daughters of Hugh and Rupert respectively, finally get the opportunity to set up house together in London, experiencing their first taste of independence.

And Louise marries Michael, and becomes for him and his family a rather icky combo of child bride and breeding mare. In fact, the most chilling part of the whole saga is in many ways Louise's (many of whose experiences were Howard's own). She has a horrible experience of giving birth, left alone with unsympathetic and bossy nurses. She doesn't like her baby, and suspects he doesn't like her... Michael becomes more and more obnoxious (cold, patronizing, demanding, bossy), and his ghastly, over-protective mother, Zinnia, actually threatens her daughter-in-law at one point. No wonder Louise falls in love with Hugo. Whom Michael's family engineer to get sent off to war, where he dies, and they don't even tell her... Cads.

Archibald, the archetypal good guy -- upright, discreet, and caring -- becomes the recipient of many family confidences. But he's another aspect of the ubiquitous older-men theme, as Polly and Clary, albeit in different ways, orbit him like the sun. So many older men... Louise and Michael; Angela and her unsuitable BBC man, and then her American... Even Zoe, Rupert's second wife, is much younger than he is. And when he goes missing for years on end, she falls in love with an older American, who's a military photographer (and commits suicide after chronicling the concentration camps).

I can't judge the extent to which this age-disparity theme is a fair reflection of the era. What I can evaluate, because it is so very realistic, is the depiction of the relationship between Zoe and her widowed mother, who shares a house with her friend Maud on the Isle of Wight. There's a wonderful little cameo of one of Zoe's visits, as she struggles to fit in with the ladies' genteel but poverty-stricken lives, and their stilted, polite conversation. The scene where Zoe's mother is insisting on paying for the underclothes Zoe has brought her from London is so very true-to-life that it makes you ache. No less so the eternal self-recrimination of the visiting child... (In the following volume, too, we experience Zoe's mother "not wanting to be a burden...") 









Towards the end of the book we have VE Day. There's much joy and celebration. But a lot of characters are also wondering what life after the war will bring for them. The war might be over, but it has changed everything and everybody.

Will we find the same, I wonder, when this pandemic ends, if it ever does?

As we finish, both Jessica and the Edward/Viola duo are upset because their respective children, Angela and Teddy, are marrying Americans; Louise is heart-broken because Hugo has been killed; Polly is heart-broken because her love for Archie is unrequited. Archie, we suspect, is in love with Clary, but there's a conversation towards the end that indicates she is highly aware of the age difference. Long may it remain so, we think to ourselves.

We close with Rupert, still alive, and making his way incognito back across the Channel, leaving behind the woman who has sheltered him, along with a baby born to that relationship.

I guess it's true to say that the Cazalets as a family got off relatively lightly during the war. They suffered privations, of course, and much anxiety -- not knowing Rupert's fate; worrying about family members travelling up and down to London and occasionally copping air raids; struggling to keep the timber business afloat throughout the blitz. But they're shielded by the large family house in the country. They are definitely in a better position than those who were bombed out of house and home, or lost family and friends for ever.

Nevertheless, there's a sort of bleakness about the end of the book. It is just not possible to break so many things, and then expect life to revert to the way it was before all the breaking happened...











Casting Off

"Why isn't it better now the war is over?" wonders one character early in this fourth book, originally the last in the series. And that's certainly a big theme of this volume.

On the one hand, there's a discouraging amount of stasis. Rationing continues. The cities are wrecked. There are so many things about the war that people don't want to speak about.

On the other hand, there is much flux. New policies and ways of governing are washing over Britain, causing -- depending on your political position -- anxiety or hope. The country's role in the world is changing.

The emotional manifestations of casting off are happening everywhere, as relationships remain frustrating and/or ephemeral for many of the characters. Christopher -- disappointed in his love for Polly, who is still getting over Archie -- casts off the world, and becomes a monk. Thelma is eventually booted out by Sid, which is a good thing because she's way too clingy and manipulative, and anyway the person Sid really loves is Rachel. Jessica is cast off by the ghastly "Lorenzo", but that's probably a good thing too. Jessica's husband, Raymond, abandons Veronica (and here we have another relationship with a much older man). And American Bernadine, terribly disappointed with England and her life there, leaves Teddy (who feels this is something of a relief). 

Edward, after years of indecision, leaves Viola for Diana. Viola's bitter and indignant rage shows how little she had ever actually loved him. (Indeed, Viola -- modelled, remember, on Howard's own mother -- is quite a scary character, who has probably done even more than Edward to mess up Louise... The only person Viola is really kind to is her old governess, Miss Milliment, to whom she offers the security of a permanent home.) By the end, however, you're definitely wondering how happy Diana and Edward are together, and whether he really made the right decision... 

Louise, very courageously, casts off Michael (who has in any case taken up with his previous girlfriend, Rowena), and in the process also leaves behind the son she was forced to have well before she was really ready.

Clary falls disastrously in love with the unspeakable Noel, a married child-man who is utterly selfish and cruel.

You have to wonder... So many of these women, young and not so young, show execrable judgement in their choice of men...  Angela, Clary, Louise, Jessica, Diana/Viola, Veronica...

And it's abundantly clear that we're in the era before contraception was really widespread. Families mushroom. Abortions (there are three in the entire series) are sometimes the only way out. 





There are two genuinely brighter lights in the narrative. Gentle Polly, freed of her fixation with Archie, falls in love with the genial if frog-like Gerald. And Rupert and Zoe manage to get their relationship back on track after their various wartime infidelities. In telling each other the truth, they finally cast off the Cazalet doctrine of silence. 

And there are two relationships that I guess we're supposed to feel happy about, but I can't entirely. Hugh remarries. He picks Jemima, a war widow 21 years younger than he is... And then there's Clary and Archie, who finally get together as an item. They have been two likable and stalwart characters. You want them to be happy. But here again, there's another huge age difference, with particular potential for the confusion of roles, since Archie acted as a kind of surrogate father to Clary when Rupert was missing. 

So, by the end of this book, and with it the original series, I was wondering whether Howard wasn't overdoing this older-man theme.

I would also have liked to know much more about the young women's working lives, which -- apart from any work-associated love interests -- are left awfully vague. Another beef was that Howard really doesn't do the "lower classes" that well. They're stereotypes, perfunctorily sketched.  

Those reservations notwithstanding, the quartet of books made for a hugely enjoyable listen. Howard's ear -- whether for conversation or inner monologue -- never failed her.







All Change 

As I said above, this one was written well after the others, and moves the action forward nine years to 1956.

We also have a different narrator for the audio-book. I'd loved Jill Balcon's reading (apart from the American accents which she didn't do that well). But she died in 2009, well before this last volume appeared. So my version of All Change is read by Penelope Wilton. Who's very good, there's no doubt about that. But four volumes in, it is a trifle disconcerting to be contending with different voices. Miss Milliment just doesn't sound like that... And Mrs Cripps (now Mrs Tonbridge) has gone all west-country on us. 

All Change opens with the death of the matriarch, "the Duchy", an event that truly marks the end of an era. 

If the rash of babies in the previous volumes had been unsettling, then the continued flood in this one has reached the point of being positively disturbing. There are just so many children... It's hard to keep up with them all, and they're really not offering anything wildly new plot-wise. They just emphasize the continued heavy yoke of motherhood.

The women's roles are still very limited, although they definitely have more scope than their mothers. Stella is a journalist. Louise models for Vogue. Lydia is an actress. There's little information on any of them. Polly is trying to turn the barn-like country house she and Gerald inhabit into a wedding venue. Clary writes. For these married women, though, there's way less about their professional endeavours than about their child-minding activities. Middle class women's lives, it is clear, have changed inexorably since the 1930s. The war is over, but there's still a LOT more housework for most of them.

Men's lives, on the other hand, seem much the same. But by the end of the book that's about to change. The old timber firm -- largely thanks to the incompetence and disunity of the male Cazalets, but also simply because of the changing environment -- goes bust. Suddenly they're faced with the need to do something new.

The women, of course, are dragged into the ghastly mess that they had nothing to do with engineering. This particularly affects Rachel, as Home Place -- the only home she has ever known, the big place in the country that sheltered them all throughout the war -- will fall into the hands of the receivers. 

The older women also seem prey to dementia. The Duchy's sister Dolly, Miss Milliment, Gerald's Nan... That's a storyline I find very resonant, although I'm not sure we actually needed three exemplars.





There are a few plot devices in this fifth volume that I think are unfortunate. I'm not sure what drove them. It's as though Howard suddenly had a downer on half her characters.

The thing between Neville and his half-sister, Juliet, is frankly weird. We just don't know enough about either of them to really understand or feel sympathetic towards this attraction, and it just comes across as bizarre. Then there's the extra-marital tempting of first Archie then Clary, which didn't really ring true to me either. And poor Sid... Did we really need another cancer death? Meanwhile, what has happened to Diana? Whereas Zoe clearly grows and matures over the course of the chronicles, and even Viola also starts to redeem herself in this last one, Diana regresses, appallingly, and becomes quite horrid, as they would have said back then. In a way there were too many characters in this last instalment. So many only have bit parts, with no character development.

Nevertheless, the final act, when the family gathers for one last Christmas at Home Place, is touching. As usual, they all smoke and drink phenomenally. As usual, there are far too many children. As usual, they're all very "darling this" and "darling that". I know I probably wouldn't have liked them in real life. But you feel for them. Anyone who has ever left anywhere they've loved, and set out on a new, unpredictable stage of life, will feel for them. And ultimately, the family rallies round. They help each other find possible solutions to their predicament. The only one partially excluded -- largely through his own fault -- is Edward.

Although I enjoyed the final volume less, the series in its entirety is still a wholly admirable achievement.





I'm never sure of the meaning of the words "true" and "real" (in my last post I talked about the issues of memory, personal experience, and "truth"); nevertheless, Tessa Hadley makes a valuable point: "What makes the chronicles worth having is first and foremost that they are a true record of a real thing. Howard is all the time testing what she writes against what she can remember. It's truth-telling, within the bounds of a fairly limited fictional convention. Howard's virtues as a writer, it turns out, are inside knowledge, exactitude, plainness, unsentimentality: virtues which bear a certain resemblance to the Cazalet family virtues."

On finishing The Cazalet Chronicles -- after 83 hours and 37 minutes of listening -- I felt as though I was saying goodbye to family, and there can't be a much higher accolade than that.