Falling in Love with the Whole Family

 

My favourite family in all fiction is Hilary McKay’s Casson family – there’s a series, starting with Saffy’s Angel. That's the one I want to belong to – I explained here that all the children have colour names, and I encouraged others to choose their colour in case Hilary wants to adopt us (go on, H). I am Alabama Crimson, a minx who tosses her hair a lot. One time on Twitter loads of us pitched in picking names – writers, readers, editors, publishers – it’s amazing how many people love the Casson books. And in addition they are ideal reading for someone who is ill

See  Best Book for a Convalescent

It is fair to say I fell in love with them.

When Nancy Mitford first read (in 1944) an advance copy of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, she sent the author, a close friend, a most enthusiastic letter, including this:

 “so true to life being in love with a whole family”.

I wrote about the book in the Guardian more than 10 years ago

Guardian Books Blog: Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

A piece that I was and am very pleased with – I reread it recently when that film Saltburn came out. I might seem to be arguing with Nancy (as if!) because I say Sebastian’s love for Charles is the driving force, but Charles is clearly seduced by the house and its occupants. He does betray Sebastian, just as Sebastian expected. Nancy M asks Evelyn ‘Are you, or are you not on Lady Marchmain’s side?’

Evelyn says – intriguingly – ‘No I am not on her side, but God is…’ It has to be said, a mother trying to stop her clearly-alcoholic son from drinking is not seen as such a hate figure when you read the book again in later life…

So this led me on to thinking about falling in love with fictional families: what a tempting subject that is, and one that I’m sure readers will want to join in on.

There are several different ideas here.

There are books where a character becomes enchanted with a family that offers something they don’t get in their own life. That would be Brideshead, and also Nancy Mitford’s own Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate (tags below). Fanny the cousin – an only child whose parents have effectively abandoned her – sinks into the warmth and friendliness and noise when she visits the Radletts’ home, Alconleigh. She loves all her cousins unquestioningly – as they love her.

One of my favourite books from 40 years ago was Barbara Trapido’s Brother of the More Famous Jack, which (apart from giving a lovely phrase structure in its title, I borrowed it actually for Evelyn Waugh’s brother Alec) is just wonderful. Student heroine Katherine becomes enmeshed with the  Goldman family: her tutor, his Bohemian wife Jane, their six children. Their life, their lifestyle, their house in the country, their messy way of living: she becomes part of it all. Much of it seems as if it will be familiar tropes, cliches, but it is not. These are real people and real feelings and real conversations.

I have just reread it, so will do a separate post on it soon.

Another category is one we have discussed in the comments (at length) recently: books where there is an eccentric family whom the author obviously loves, and expects the readers to love too.

I am very un-enchanted by these on the whole, and the comments suggest others feel the same.

Agatha Christie (with her cool unsentimental eye) wasn’t particularly prone to this but she fell in the otherwise very accomplished The Hollow. Lucy Angkatell and her houseful of friends and relations, with the servants sorting everything for her, and adoring her – bleah. I find her deeply uncharming, and the whole setup ripe for being swept away in a communist revolution.

Ngaio Marsh is a more obvious offender, and we have to face up to the awful example of the Lampreys. I hold my hand up: when I was a young teenager I thought A Surfeit of Lampreys was a wonderful book, and the family within were  eccentric, amusing, Bohemian rule-breakers. Reading the book again at an advanced age, I was horrified by them. Shameful snobbish frauds, the whole lot, without a shred of morality.

In my recent post on Annoying Detectives, I also took umbrage at Inspector Alleyn (in a different book) having these thoughts as he enters a house.

As he lit his pipe he was visited by a strange thought. It came into his mind that he stood on the threshold of a new relationship, that he would return to this old room and again sit before the fire.

He is on his way to INTERVIEW SUSPECTS. Unprejudiced, much? It probably wasn’t the fault of the family concerned, but still.

There was a similar situation in her False Scent.

Patricia Moyes gave us a very annoying bunch of eccentrics, the Manciple family, in Murder Fantastical – again a self-consciously quirky crew all completely selfish and self-centred, and rather stupid. I did not like them at all. (Great garden fete in the book though, for my continuing theme)

That post brought a suggestion from Johan, a staunch blogfriend whose recommendations are normally very reliable.

Johan: I nominate the Bodenheim family and the Cripps Clan from Martha Grimes "The Anodyne Necklace". Both are written for laughs and are caricatures for comic effect. I haven't read the book in over thirty years so they might not be so funny anymore.

I said then – haven’t read a Grimes for ages. A few pages in I remembered why. Like Elizabeth George, Grimes seems never to have set foot in England. The book is set in a village which is in Hereford and is also 40 miles from London (no), and in the previous few years has changed its name (no) and had a railway station added to its amenities (no). I suppose it may not matter that all these things are completely impossible, because Littlebourne has been beamed down from Planet Grimes. So is it reasonable that it is the least convincing English village I have ever found? Because I am so pedantic, I was very unentertained by the 2 x families, one rich one poor… 

The book does feature poison-pen letters, a jewel robbery in the past, and a village fete, so has a bingo line of Clothes in Books recent interests. Others may enjoy it. There is one good clue – the map ‘of the village' and what it resembles. The other clue – she was probably unlucky – concerns an abbreviation I don’t believe anyone has ever used. This is plonked in, not mentioned again till the final pages, and puzzled me enough to make me realize something about a character. Case solved, early doors. But as I say, that may be just bad luck. And I probably will feature the fortune teller at the garden fete in a future post…

And now we go back to the beginning for the third category -  the books where the reader falls in love with a whole family. That’s me with the Cassons, the Radletts, and the Mortmains in I Capture the Castle (though all three have problematic fathers).

So who else has fallen in love with a family? Or resisted the charms of the darling eccentrics? Which authors wrote great family scenes? I’m expecting great joy in the comments.

Photos of families: 

More Power to your elbow sir! | The old catchphrase for Powe… | Flickr

Gloria Vanderbilt - 1 (LOC) | Frissell, Toni,, 1907-1988,, p… | Flickr

 Yoder Family on Train, Japan | Caption: Yoder family on a tr… | Flickr