A House in the Country
26. Jocelyn Playfair, A House in the Country
This novel, set in the spring and summer of 1942, tells the stories of several individuals whose lives have been radically altered by war. Cressida Chance has been left in possession of Brede Manor, a beautiful estate in the English countryside. Since so many people have lost their homes due to the war, she offers them refuge at Brede by renting out rooms. The characters who stay at Brede find some solace in their hostess’ kindness, and they share many conversations about how the war is changing everything they know. Meanwhile, Cressida herself muses about the consequences of the war and pines for the man she loves, who is currently stranded in a lifeboat somewhere in the Atlantic.
This book’s lovely prose made a big impression on me; it’s absolutely beautifully written with many quotable lines and paragraphs. Ultimately, the novel is quite philosophical in tone, with different characters individually musing about the meaning of life for pages at a time. Normally this would bother me, but I think Playfair handles the intellectual content well. What makes this novel so fascinating is that Playfair wrote it while World War II was still going on; the Allied victory was by no means certain, and she was actually living through a situation similar to the one she describes in the book. For this reason, the characters’ fears and emotions felt very present and believable to me. While the novel doesn’t have a traditionally happy ending, it manages to be uplifting in spite of the suffering it describes. I would definitely recommend this to anyone who wants to get a sense of what the war was really like to someone who lived through it.