Vita Sackville West - the Edwardians

I generally love books set in the Edwardian period. I'd never read any of Sackville West's books, but knew of her through Virginia Woolf biographies, etc. I found this old, old Hogarth Press edition in dirty orange covers a couple of weeks ago, mooching in Macclesfield.

It's very interesting because, although she does so many things right - lovely description and period detailing (it's set thirty years before her time of writing); occasionally waspish, funny flashes of dialogue and gems of wit... there's something missing from the novel. At the end it feels like it was all played on one note. It's all set-up and premise and nothing much else.

Lots of potential for classy drama, here, though. We've got the last two children of the grand house of Chevron, Sebastian and Viola. Sebastian is the nineteen year old last son of the family - we're told endlessly how strapping and 'patrician' he is. Houseguest and globe-trotting radical, Leonard Anquetil challenges the son and seduces the daughter (by airmail). We don't hear much about the actual seducing - we just get some dreary conversations about the fall of the great families, etc etc. And all the queer undercurrents *stay* under, too - even though it is Sebastian who eventually sails into the wild blue yonder with Leonard. It's Sebastian, rather than Viola, who gets taken up the Limpopo...

I just wish there had been a few more set-to's and to-do's in this. Whether it's Sebastian's crush on Anquetil, or his scandalous affair with his mother's best friend, or his dalliance with a doctor's wife - each of these potentially interesting, explosive set-ups is faded out and finished before it can get anywhere.

In a sense, Sebastian's is the last point of view the author should have plumped for. Yes, she's telling the whole story of the decline of a class through his adventures (a bit like 'Upstairs, Downstairs', thirty odd years later would tell much the same tale - much more effectively - through the story of James.) but it'd be so much better if we never got to see how vacuous he really was: if he was observed only by those characters who touch on his life and get discarded by him, one after the next.

Strangely, it seems as if Sackville West has it all going on. It reads like a novel, it's written nicely. There are even some lovely scenes - especially when he almost gets the doctor's wife into bed. The two of them watch the snow falling on the grounds of Chevron. His room is lit a chilly blue. He prepares to launch himself upon what appears to be a willing victim. And the doctor's wife is just mortified. Similarly, I liked the scenes with his older mistress realising that she is being snubbed by society for her indiscretion. But again, there's something missing. The connective tissue. The real warmth generated by a living piece of fiction. It's as if she has the skills, but none of the true talents, of a novelist. That's what I came away from this nice old edition thinking.