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

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The novel is both funny and terrifying precisely because of the suspicion that Aroon knows exactly what is going on and that the only way to survive is to behave as though she doesn’t. Aroon progresses in the big house on her own, as she thinks she should, practicing the good behavior of her rank until she learns good behavior isn't quite proper. 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.

She felt shut out by the bond between her parents, and excluded by her mother’s preoccupation with writing. 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. A real work of craftsmanship, where the heroine is also the narrator, yet has no idea what is going on.Readers of Clair Wills’s essay about Molly Keane and Good Behaviour may be surprised to hear that this extraordinary novel almost didn’t get published ( LRB, 18 March). I must say that the first few pages have put me off - none of the characters are sympathetic, empathetic or kind. Two years earlier Mamie Cadden, a midwife and backstreet abortionist, had been sentenced to a year’s hard labour for abandoning and exposing a baby on the roadside in County Meath.

I’d really only started because when I was seventeen the doctor said there was a threat I might have TB and I had to stay in bed.Little surprise then when Aroon offers this poignant revelation: “Only when alone could I feel a small, cherished person.

Nothing is ever brought above the level of what is decent, not a flinching emotion not a tear not a raised voice.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! Perhaps the perfect time to read it is now, in a global pandemic, when time feels stopped, present and past atrocities knit together on a single stitch.