Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie by Nancy Mitford
This is the first time I have read this author who has several other better-known works such as Love in a Cold Climate.
The first story in this combo I would give 3 stars. I was surprised by the quality of the writing. Nancy Mitford, the oldest of the legendary 6 Mitford girls, wrote several novels and works of non-fiction about famous people; Madam Pompadour, The Sun King and Frederick the Great among them. She is better known as one of the funniest writers of the 20th century and is very overlooked today.
Christmas Pudding was the second of her novels and was written whilst going through an unsuccessful relationship with the bon vivant, Hamish St.Clair-Erskine. He was sent to America by his parents and the heartbroken Nancy turned to writing for solace.
The story, centred on a group of 16 people which are introduced at the beginning, romps along at a good pace from November 1931, through the Christmas period and shortly afterward. In it, Mitford explores issues such as class, money, happiness in marriage (and out of it) and respectability in the world she lived in. Some couples have love but not money, some money but not love. No one, according to Nancy, gets both. Despite this gloomy take on marital bliss, the book is nevertheless a funny snapshot of the time. Does the main male protagonist, Paul Fotheringay, author of the tragic story, Crazy Capers which was wrongly viewed as a comedy by the reading public, win the hand of his fair love, Philadelphia Bobbin, daughter of Lady Bobbin? Read it and see.
Pigeon Pie was Nancy's 4th novel and published in 1940. I found it be to be slower going than Christmas Pudding but it picked up towards the end. The book deals with the time during the immediate outbreak of WWII, the period known as 'the phoney war'. As nothing seemed to change, to the people of England there was the Boer War, then the Great War and then the Great Bore War. Sadly this period did not last long.
The story's protagonist is an upper class woman, Sophia Garfield, who wants to help out in the war effort but gets involved in a rather unexpected and funny way. Unfortunately, the story and the timing of it's publishing was, to quote the author in a post war edition, 'an almost unexcelled example of bad timing for a comic novel.' I can see why the people of Britain would not have found what Nancy wrote funny at the time. Today, one can read it as a satire of the wealthy upper class 'bright young things' and their response to the frightening imminence of war. Again I would give this novel 3 stars.
Pigeon Pie was Nancy's 4th novel and published in 1940. I found it be to be slower going than Christmas Pudding but it picked up towards the end. The book deals with the time during the immediate outbreak of WWII, the period known as 'the phoney war'. As nothing seemed to change, to the people of England there was the Boer War, then the Great War and then the Great Bore War. Sadly this period did not last long.
The story's protagonist is an upper class woman, Sophia Garfield, who wants to help out in the war effort but gets involved in a rather unexpected and funny way. Unfortunately, the story and the timing of it's publishing was, to quote the author in a post war edition, 'an almost unexcelled example of bad timing for a comic novel.' I can see why the people of Britain would not have found what Nancy wrote funny at the time. Today, one can read it as a satire of the wealthy upper class 'bright young things' and their response to the frightening imminence of war. Again I would give this novel 3 stars.
For more about this wonderful author see the Nancy Mitford website.
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