In which there are Lutterels, Lutterwells, and The Sun in Scorpio
- Reading, books 2016, 168
161. The Sun in Scorpio, by Margery Sharp, 1965, covers the life and times of a middle class woman from the age of eight in Gozo, 1914, to the age of forty in Devon, 1945, but it's not a bildungsroman because the protagonist's character doesn't develop much and she remains oddly immature, apart from learning to play poker and drink alcohol, and detached from the circumstances of her life and the people around her. This makes for an unempathetic protag, although I did have sympathy for her, but then the story isn't about her as a person but as a viewpoint character experiencing the collapse of the British Empire and the consequent extinction of a whole class of imperial administrators and their "Ruling Race" hangers-on who could live like the upper middle classes while abroad but were dramatically downwardly mobile on returning "home" to the UK and, while there are amusing moments and the novel is more lightly middlebrow than heavily literary, the whole effect is more tragedy than comedy. (4/5)
• On casualness and casualties, 1914-18: There is nothing like war for rapid promotion; Army rejoiced with Navy, and in the Navy none more so than each midshipman wolfing down a last hot scone at Mrs Pennon's Sunday tea. / To be more precise, Henry Alistair McCrimmon, subsequently drowned in the North Sea, Henry Arthur Cooke, drowned in the Channel, and William Powell blown up with his ship off Gallipoli. / All of which names, it was the fashion of the time, pencilled upon Mrs Pennon's Sunday tea-cloth, to be immortalized [sic] by Muriel in chain-stitch.
• I always assume this about people: 'That's simply the paradigm, old man. - Did I say paradigm? I must be drunk,' said the M.O. 'I'm always drunk when I say paradigm.'
• An in context OUCH: All Tommy Bamber really knew about her was that she played tennis and had good skin. [Like her mother... OUCH.]
• Paging Dr Freud and his guilt: A flicker of low gas-light on the frame of the text above the bed transmuted gilt to pure gold. (THOUGH THE LORD SEEST ME: the capitals also gilded, [...].)
• The Lutterel family in Devon, especially pg102-3, and Chard was supposedly over 20 miles away (as Taunton is from Dunster, just sayin'). Also found in Tigress on the Hearth, as Lutterwell, which suggests Margery Sharp was deliberately baiting someone in particular (presumably "Lady Jean"): With an uncouth cry the Albanian leapt forward and presented his firelock to Mr. Lutterwell’s breast. / This circumstance was all the more arresting in that there was absolutely nothing in Hugo Lutterwell’s birth, character, or education to foreshadow so violent an event. He had been born in 1830, plump into the deep peace of Victorian England, in which his father’s Devonshire estate made a pocket of peace deeper still. There he grew to manhood among fat lands and fat cattle, fat squires and their fat wives; at Rugby, under the great Doctor Arnold, he acquired earnestness rather than ambition; at Trinity he learnt to hold his liquor; and two London seasons gave him a settled distaste for metropolitan society. He was thus perfectly equipped to carry on the comfortable Lutterwell traditions of good farming, good neighbourliness, and the parson to Sunday dinner, but with Albanians he was at a disadvantage.
• Comics: [...] just as a mother and daughter in a slum swap comics, so Lady Jean and Elspet swapped glossies.
• The servants downstairs with "loyalty no more suspect than an Indian regiment before the Mutiny."
• Digging for victory, 1939-45 (Mr Weaver is the butler): Was a hedgehog injurious to vegetables, or not? She couldn't remember. Botany at Miss Allen's hadn't included hedgehogs. Should it be driven away with sticks and stones, or encouraged to stay and eat greenfly? As Weaver came tramping towards her over the hummocks of an old asparagus bed -
'What do I do,' called Cathy, 'with a hedgehog?'
'Train it to stop a tank,' said Mr Weaver. 'The French have packed in.'
• On wood-cutting (for victory), 1939-45: [...] in due course the woods behind the Manor began to show the sort of browsing-line from which is deducible whether a proprietor runs cattle, ornamental deer, or goats. What could have been deduced at Wellscombe was an elderly but resolute butler.
• Cathy, the heroine, working as a governess at a stately home feels actual gratitude towards the butler Mr Weaver because he "hadn't raped her".
• At the beginning of the novel the Governor (of Gozo), who is ex-military, is despised by his juniors for not immediately using violence against "natives" in India to prevent a riot in which 50 people died, but by the end of the novel times have changed and even his military contemporaries look down on him for using violent capital punishment on two Africans ("had two Fuzzy-Wuzzies flogged to death" on pg150 and pg185).
• 'There's never been an Empire yet,' said His Excellency, 'the sun didn't set on. Perhaps I should have told you that too. It's a time for beginning again.'
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161. The Sun in Scorpio, by Margery Sharp, 1965, covers the life and times of a middle class woman from the age of eight in Gozo, 1914, to the age of forty in Devon, 1945, but it's not a bildungsroman because the protagonist's character doesn't develop much and she remains oddly immature, apart from learning to play poker and drink alcohol, and detached from the circumstances of her life and the people around her. This makes for an unempathetic protag, although I did have sympathy for her, but then the story isn't about her as a person but as a viewpoint character experiencing the collapse of the British Empire and the consequent extinction of a whole class of imperial administrators and their "Ruling Race" hangers-on who could live like the upper middle classes while abroad but were dramatically downwardly mobile on returning "home" to the UK and, while there are amusing moments and the novel is more lightly middlebrow than heavily literary, the whole effect is more tragedy than comedy. (4/5)
• On casualness and casualties, 1914-18: There is nothing like war for rapid promotion; Army rejoiced with Navy, and in the Navy none more so than each midshipman wolfing down a last hot scone at Mrs Pennon's Sunday tea. / To be more precise, Henry Alistair McCrimmon, subsequently drowned in the North Sea, Henry Arthur Cooke, drowned in the Channel, and William Powell blown up with his ship off Gallipoli. / All of which names, it was the fashion of the time, pencilled upon Mrs Pennon's Sunday tea-cloth, to be immortalized [sic] by Muriel in chain-stitch.
• I always assume this about people: 'That's simply the paradigm, old man. - Did I say paradigm? I must be drunk,' said the M.O. 'I'm always drunk when I say paradigm.'
• An in context OUCH: All Tommy Bamber really knew about her was that she played tennis and had good skin. [Like her mother... OUCH.]
• Paging Dr Freud and his guilt: A flicker of low gas-light on the frame of the text above the bed transmuted gilt to pure gold. (THOUGH THE LORD SEEST ME: the capitals also gilded, [...].)
• The Lutterel family in Devon, especially pg102-3, and Chard was supposedly over 20 miles away (as Taunton is from Dunster, just sayin'). Also found in Tigress on the Hearth, as Lutterwell, which suggests Margery Sharp was deliberately baiting someone in particular (presumably "Lady Jean"): With an uncouth cry the Albanian leapt forward and presented his firelock to Mr. Lutterwell’s breast. / This circumstance was all the more arresting in that there was absolutely nothing in Hugo Lutterwell’s birth, character, or education to foreshadow so violent an event. He had been born in 1830, plump into the deep peace of Victorian England, in which his father’s Devonshire estate made a pocket of peace deeper still. There he grew to manhood among fat lands and fat cattle, fat squires and their fat wives; at Rugby, under the great Doctor Arnold, he acquired earnestness rather than ambition; at Trinity he learnt to hold his liquor; and two London seasons gave him a settled distaste for metropolitan society. He was thus perfectly equipped to carry on the comfortable Lutterwell traditions of good farming, good neighbourliness, and the parson to Sunday dinner, but with Albanians he was at a disadvantage.
• Comics: [...] just as a mother and daughter in a slum swap comics, so Lady Jean and Elspet swapped glossies.
• The servants downstairs with "loyalty no more suspect than an Indian regiment before the Mutiny."
• Digging for victory, 1939-45 (Mr Weaver is the butler): Was a hedgehog injurious to vegetables, or not? She couldn't remember. Botany at Miss Allen's hadn't included hedgehogs. Should it be driven away with sticks and stones, or encouraged to stay and eat greenfly? As Weaver came tramping towards her over the hummocks of an old asparagus bed -
'What do I do,' called Cathy, 'with a hedgehog?'
'Train it to stop a tank,' said Mr Weaver. 'The French have packed in.'
• On wood-cutting (for victory), 1939-45: [...] in due course the woods behind the Manor began to show the sort of browsing-line from which is deducible whether a proprietor runs cattle, ornamental deer, or goats. What could have been deduced at Wellscombe was an elderly but resolute butler.
• Cathy, the heroine, working as a governess at a stately home feels actual gratitude towards the butler Mr Weaver because he "hadn't raped her".
• At the beginning of the novel the Governor (of Gozo), who is ex-military, is despised by his juniors for not immediately using violence against "natives" in India to prevent a riot in which 50 people died, but by the end of the novel times have changed and even his military contemporaries look down on him for using violent capital punishment on two Africans ("had two Fuzzy-Wuzzies flogged to death" on pg150 and pg185).
• 'There's never been an Empire yet,' said His Excellency, 'the sun didn't set on. Perhaps I should have told you that too. It's a time for beginning again.'
This entry was originally posted at http://spiralsheep.dreamwidth.org/599792.html and has
comments Please comment there using OpenID.