AMONG THE CORONETS
LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE, by Nancy Mitford; Hamish Hamilton. English price, 8/6. HIS novel has been named "book of the month" by three societies which devote themselves to that high literary function; and in the face of such ‘authority it may seem presumptuous to cast a dissenting vote. Yet one New Zealander responded coolly to what has been described on the dust jacket as "a riotously funny chronicle of family life among the coronets.". The people who come together in stately homes for sophisticated talk about the intrigues of their friends and relations seem to be pathetic rather than funny. Polly, the beautiful daughter of Lady Montdore, loiters so palely in the foreground that there is scarcely a sign of life in her; and her marriage to her mother’s elderly lover can be explained and tolerated only by the most artificial laws of comedy. Similarly, the fifteen-year-old girls who talk naughtily of Freud are so much in need of a spanking that the humorous element in their precocity-if it exists at all-passes unnoticed. And the unctuous Cedric, who becomes a sort of second daughter to the frustrated Lady Montdore, belongs to a type of fiction which some of us thought had become happily extinct before the recent
war.
M.H.
H.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 546, 9 December 1949, Page 18
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214AMONG THE CORONETS New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 546, 9 December 1949, Page 18
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