The Divine Lissa Evans and her Small Bomb at Dimperley

Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans 

published 2024

 

 

 

Young people use a phrase: IYKYK, which looks like you banged on the keyboard, but means ‘If you know, you know’. It describes how I feel about Lissa Evans: I, and many others, love her books and wait impatiently for the next one. All her recent novels have been set in the mid-20^th century – though there are also the children’s books. (I have featured Wed Wabbit on the blog, and have also made myself popular by giving Wished to a young friend, who immediately went on to read all her books.) I do now know Lissa, but that is because of my fandom.

This new book is not part of the loose trilogy of Old Baggage, Crooked Heart and V for Victory (all on the blog, easily found, along with Their Finest): a new setting, and a date of 1945.

It’s the end of the war, and we are firmly based at Dimperley Manor,  a big house in Buckinghamshire of unusual architecture. A character is reminded of an illo for an E Nesbit book, The Enchanted Castle, on the blog here as it happens, so I chose a pic from an edition of the book – though this may be quite other from Lissa’s vision. The cover of the book, above, is stunningly beautiful, and we may take it as showing the interior of this house full of nonsense, rooted in the past.

There is a wide and splendid collection of characters: the awful old Dowager Irene, and her put-upon maid Miss Hersey. The next generation – sons Val and Cedric, and widowed sister-in-law Barbara. Barbara’s daughters who have been in the USA for the duration of the war and have come back to turn a very cold eye on English life. And Zena, a young woman from London who came to Dimperley when it was requisitioned as a maternity home, had her daughter Allison -  one of the most convincing 3 year olds I have ever encountered in a book – and has stayed on. She is secretary to loopy old Uncle Alaric, who is obsessed with the history and contents of the house, and also with the family, who have lived there forever without achieving much, and – of course – are running out of money.

That probably sounds complicated but part of Lissa Evans’ wizardry is that all these people become very clear and distinct, and she moves point-of-view between them with wonderful felicity. Just when you think someone is plain annoying, she shows you what they are thinking. She is fair in the playground sense. She aso treats her readers as adults, letting them draw their own conclusions at times.

All these people have concerns about their future, and about money, and are recovering from World War 2. Must the house be sold? There is a hilarious visit from a National Trust operative  - the ‘diary entry’ stunningly takes off James Lees-Milne who spent his days looking at  houses, his evenings in society, and his nights writing up his bitchy diary. (One of his books is here on the blog, and he also turns up in other entries because of my grumpy socialist obsession with society life in the 1930s and 1940s). To anyone who knows his writing, it is perfect. And - no surprise: the NT don’t want Dimperley. But Zena, who is more competent than everyone else put together, has a good idea. I don’t think it is a spoiler to say that they are hoping to open Dimperley to the public. Here they are, going to check out the opposition - a much less interesting house on display:

Kitty realized that they were going to have to look at every single one of these God- awful tapestries, and that the day was going to be just as dull as she’d imagined. Lucky Miss Hersey, sitting in a warm kitchen with her friend the cook, probably eating cakes straight from the oven. Zena had her notebook out again and was drawing a firm line under something. ‘What are you writing?’ She tilted the page and Kitty read the words ‘Very boring’ and snickered and felt a death ray shooting out of the back of the butler’s head. Zena remained perfectly composed; she reminded Kitty of a store detective –  someone you assumed was just a part of the crowd until you realized they weren’t missing a thing.

can we sell a lot of rock buns and make money?

The book has a strong plot, and several unexpected turns, and it is just flat-out brilliant: keeps you reading, keeps you laughing, keeps you thinking about all manner of aspects of life at that time, and the rights and wrongs of the landed gentry.  I would say ‘charming’, but the book has a bit of a go at that:

Charm was easy; a naturally charming person just had to turn on the tap and there it was, a directionless gift, soaking all within range. It worked every time, but it didn’t last. The charming person went away and you were left standing there, growing colder by the minute.

So I'll go with delightful, and melancholy, and funny.

I am trying to hard to describe what I love so much about Lissa’s writing – I recently said of a Kevin Kwan book ‘I love the jokes, and also I think it’s clear that Kwan isn’t just phoning it in, there’s no filler.’ I would say that also of Tana French, and Lissa is an absolute beacon of this feature. And so, all three of them are compulsively readable.

 I do not like over-decorated prose, fancy descriptions, unnecessary adjectives – that makes me cringe. But Lissa I feel has perfected every sentence, without making it too obvious or attention-seeking. There are throwaway jokes on every page – I challenged myself to give it a try in a random place, and this is the result:

Pupils were not allowed to leave the school premises during the day for any reason whatsoever, short of being carried off in an ambulance, something that had actually happened to Kitty’s classmate Bonita Astley just a week ago, after she’d been knocked unconscious by a lacrosse throw-in. Kitty, who, on her second day at the school had pointed out that in the USA the sport was played only by grown men, had felt vindicated as a moaning Bonita was loaded on to the stretcher.

She also give us some clothes, including a jaw-dropping clothes diary for the Dowager, kept by the maid. I went for the more modern descriptions:

 

The singer... was Kitty. Kitty wearing a yellow dress slit up to the thigh and a silk rose in her hair.

 

Zena was wearing a natty little fawn hat with a jay’s feather that caught the light.

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The suit below, I fear, bears no resemblance to anything worn by the women of Dimperley at that time, but I wanted to give them something smart:

 

I loved this book, and its so very real characters. I keep thinking about them, and wondering what the future held for them.  I cannot recommend Dimperley (and its predecessors) enough, and it is a continuing mystery to me why Lissa Evans doesn’t win every literary prize going. Is it because she is too entertaining, along with Amanda Craig, Harriet Evans and other women writers?

The scrum for refreshments is from the IWM's wonderful collections, (and is actually at the National Gallery).

LEISURE AND ENTERTAINMENT DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR | Imperial War Museums (iwm.org.uk)

Singer June Christy from the Gottlieb collection

Hat from NYPL, also suit.