Good Behaviour: A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick – Booker Prize Gems (Virago Modern Classics)

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I stepped up to my reflection, then away from it, and I could find only surprise and delight in what I saw. The 1938 trial was reported in detail in the Irish Times, and throughout the war stories of infant death and abandonment appeared in the papers. Keane’s brilliant sleight of hand is to allow her blinkered heroine to narrate her own development from neglected child, to ungainly debutante, to bitter spinster: Aroon understands nothing, yet she reveals all. What is being celebrated here is appetite for the whole of experience, a benign form of promiscuity.

I n​ Molly Keane: A Life, her biography of her mother from 2017, Sally Phipps records an occasion in the 1920s when a dead baby was found inside a hat box floating down the River Slaney.But it is sustained because that's what these characters do, in spite of their fraying, worn-thin elbows. She ends by referencing males in general: ‘He sticks that thing of his … into the hole she pees out of … It’s a thing men do, it’s all they want to do, and you won’t like it. Her sixth novel, Devoted Ladies (1934), features gay and lesbian characters modeled after the theater types she’d met at the home of her bisexual friend John Perry, and it marks a major break from her earlier novels, heralding a more mature phase. Molly Keane was in her late seventies when Good Behaviour was first published in 1981 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize ( Midnight’s Children won). While it may appear that there is little to like or admire among the book’s characters—including Richard, Hubert’s intimate friend, with whom Aroon falls hopelessly and eternally in love, against all odds—Keane supplies a cast of supporting players who give us hope for humanity.

You have all the right to smile and laugh at the stories but remember that these stories are being used in our daily lives as well and we have to be careful to separate what we are actually seeing from the stories being 'told'. Half the meat was eaten while the other half went bad, hanging in the musty ice house without any ice. She had a bedpost filled with pieces of gold they gave her, and one way and another she served them well.

Keane’s descriptions of the impecunious rich owed something to her parents’ experience: they had, after all, bought into the Ascendancy just as it was breaking up. I've put 'good' in inverted commas, because it's behaviour but the 'good' part is certainly in question as we follow their shenanigans playing musical beds, drama with the governess and the neighbours etcetera etcetera all under the 'innocent' eyes of Aroon, born and well bred with the 'stiff upper lip' culture. The only exception being the maid Rose who kept the household going, working and caring her way through the narrative, shifting her alliances towards whichever household member required her attention.

They are part of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy falling into decline after the First War and the Irish Independance wars in the early part of the 20th century - although there is not a single reference to this important political event in Irish history.

When Richard skips out of England before his wedding and moves to Kenya with Baby Kintoull (‘Married? So there is sex, murder, suicide, pregnancy, masturbation, nannies, class, queer characters and much more. we know, even if she doesn’t, that this act of symbolic cannibalism is meant to perfect her revenge. This fine novel is made even more interesting by a 1st chapter which acts as a kind of coda for the novel. Anyway, I opened this book anyway, because I was on vacation abroad, - see my blog post Ellen versus Warriors - and it was the only book I had taken with me that I had left to read!

Aroon's charismatic father is recovering from a war injury which causes feelings of discontent and failure, but bridges a gap between his children as he strives to face his vulnerability. Aroon is cursed from the start with an ordinary need for love and a body out of sync with the 1920s fetish for slim, boyish figures.

In her twenties she wrote Young Entry (1928), Taking Chances (1929), Mad Puppetstown (1931), and Conversation Piece (1932), all witty horse-and-hound romances chronicling a dying way of life.