REREAD: Three Towers in Tuscany
Three Towers in Tuscany: Malcolm Saville. Heineman, 1967
It seems as if everyone has been doing a Something Month, if not Dry January, Veganuary or Digital Detox January, then something this month, including blogging themes. This inspired me to do Rereading February. Don’t get too excited, my aspiration is to get my numbers of books read up from ‘abysmally poor’ to ‘relatively poor’. I have a pile of ‘books to reread’ that’s been ignored for a while. My reasoning was that a month of rereading books only might help me make a dent in it and even give some of them away. I have tended to be swayed by novelty into buying book after book and being slow to read them too. The sweetener was that I could turn to comfort books.
This book doesn’t fit into either category. As I now have ‘The Purple Valley’, the second Marston Baines mystery, I thought I should reread ‘Three Towers’, which I bought for what must have been cheaper than a pack of Rolos. I was familiar with the Lone Pine Club and the Buckingams, certainly, when I first bought and read this, but much younger than the characters who were reading modern languages at university. I’m now well past that age.
The appearance of our hero, Simon Baines, is never described. We only know that he is better dressed than his chums who are in Tuscany, Italy on a driving holiday. But whereas they’re camping outdoors, he’s staying with his uncle. Marston Baines is a thriller writer who Simon doesn’t know well.
On his first night in Fiesole, Simon encounters a compatriot of his own age in Rosina Conway, who acts as if she’s in a Gothic romance, not a thriller during this initial meeting. Her appearance is described - we know she’s pretty and feminine, of which both hero and, one suspects, author approve. I was more concerned about Rosina blaming herself for having rejected the unwanted advances of an older man at an excruciating dinner when she was forced into playing hostess.
Although Simon is meant to come across as smart and resourceful, he is a bit of an idiot at times. Granted, the reader knows more than him, as whole chapters set far from Tuscany give us more information, but there was one point where I thought ‘A Lone Piner would never have done that,’ be it a boy or an older character. He also has a nice line in being John Bull in a china shop, and while it’s understandable that he’s riled at being lied to, his behaviour contributes to a man’s death - because this is aimed at a slightly older readership than the Lone Pine, Buckinghams and Jillies series. (They drink wine!)
I was entertained by Patrick and Charles, Simon’s irreverent uni chums, who turn up a little later in the story, and try to flirt with Rosina by putting Simon down. I wish I could pin down what’s so distinctive about Saville’s style of writing dialogue. For me, Simon and Rosina exercise less of a hold than the Lone Piners and the Buckinghams, but it’s not uninteresting to see Saville use the cold war backdrop and send characters on the cusp of adulthood abroad, so we’ll see what the next book in the series is like (next month, at least).
Number of books reread this month: 1.
This entry was originally posted at https://feather-ghyll.dreamwidth.org/164467.html. Please comment wherever you prefer to.
It seems as if everyone has been doing a Something Month, if not Dry January, Veganuary or Digital Detox January, then something this month, including blogging themes. This inspired me to do Rereading February. Don’t get too excited, my aspiration is to get my numbers of books read up from ‘abysmally poor’ to ‘relatively poor’. I have a pile of ‘books to reread’ that’s been ignored for a while. My reasoning was that a month of rereading books only might help me make a dent in it and even give some of them away. I have tended to be swayed by novelty into buying book after book and being slow to read them too. The sweetener was that I could turn to comfort books.
This book doesn’t fit into either category. As I now have ‘The Purple Valley’, the second Marston Baines mystery, I thought I should reread ‘Three Towers’, which I bought for what must have been cheaper than a pack of Rolos. I was familiar with the Lone Pine Club and the Buckingams, certainly, when I first bought and read this, but much younger than the characters who were reading modern languages at university. I’m now well past that age.
The appearance of our hero, Simon Baines, is never described. We only know that he is better dressed than his chums who are in Tuscany, Italy on a driving holiday. But whereas they’re camping outdoors, he’s staying with his uncle. Marston Baines is a thriller writer who Simon doesn’t know well.
On his first night in Fiesole, Simon encounters a compatriot of his own age in Rosina Conway, who acts as if she’s in a Gothic romance, not a thriller during this initial meeting. Her appearance is described - we know she’s pretty and feminine, of which both hero and, one suspects, author approve. I was more concerned about Rosina blaming herself for having rejected the unwanted advances of an older man at an excruciating dinner when she was forced into playing hostess.
Although Simon is meant to come across as smart and resourceful, he is a bit of an idiot at times. Granted, the reader knows more than him, as whole chapters set far from Tuscany give us more information, but there was one point where I thought ‘A Lone Piner would never have done that,’ be it a boy or an older character. He also has a nice line in being John Bull in a china shop, and while it’s understandable that he’s riled at being lied to, his behaviour contributes to a man’s death - because this is aimed at a slightly older readership than the Lone Pine, Buckinghams and Jillies series. (They drink wine!)
I was entertained by Patrick and Charles, Simon’s irreverent uni chums, who turn up a little later in the story, and try to flirt with Rosina by putting Simon down. I wish I could pin down what’s so distinctive about Saville’s style of writing dialogue. For me, Simon and Rosina exercise less of a hold than the Lone Piners and the Buckinghams, but it’s not uninteresting to see Saville use the cold war backdrop and send characters on the cusp of adulthood abroad, so we’ll see what the next book in the series is like (next month, at least).
Number of books reread this month: 1.
This entry was originally posted at https://feather-ghyll.dreamwidth.org/164467.html. Please comment wherever you prefer to.