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

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The mother of the heroine must save money, well, it is commendable, except when "Her final objective was penance for all of us. She wanted everyone to suffer." Before starting this biography, I took Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour – the novel that made her name – down from the shelf. I remember the book as one might an old friend. It entranced readers in 1981, the year it was published, when it was shortlisted for the Booker (Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children won the prize). Keane had written novels and plays in the 1930s as MJ Farrell, and now, at 77 and under a new name, was being hailed as if she were a young talent (which, in a sense, she always was).

It was through the Perry family that Molly met Bobby Keane, whom she married in 1938. [2] He belonged to a Waterford landed gentry family, the Keane baronets. [1] The couple went on to have two daughters, Sally and Virginia. [2] After the death of her husband in 1946, Molly moved to Ardmore, County Waterford, a place she knew well, and lived there with her two daughters. She died on 22 April 1996 in her Cliffside home in Ardmore. She was 91. She is buried beside the Church of Ireland church, near the centre of the village. [10] Critical reception [ edit ] Then, as the reading progresses, as it is well done and well written, I end up letting myself go, although the characters remain bogged down in their inactive miserableness: Molly Keane's Good Behaviour presents a character whose own strict Christian code wreaks havoc on all those around her. Though she herself tells the tale, we somehow see her morality's disastrous consequences. Hilarious and sinister.

Like Good Behaviour, the novel proceeds in a series of intense domestic scenes and results in a series of pairings which leave Angel alone, ‘as sad as a French cemetery’. Her housekeeper, Birdie, is brilliantly described: Molly Keane’s literary career followed an unusual trajectory. She was born, in County Kildare, into a prelapsarian, Anglo-Irish idyll in which beautiful houses and riding to hounds through the bogs of southern Ireland featured large. She recalled ‘a society in which I wanted to get on jolly well. I know that sounds awful but it wasn’t a snob thing at all. To belong to and be accepted in such a society mattered greatly in one’s life.’ At 17, she wrote her first novel, The Knight of Cheerful Countenance (1921), published by Mills & Boon, to supplement her insufficient dress allowance. Events are narrated through the eyes of a child, Aroon St Charles, revealing subtle details which are confused and not understood by her, but as a reader reveal the truth she is too young and naive to grasp. Secrets, lies and tragedy surround the family as they each struggle with life events. 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's mother is cold, distant and shallow with a belittling habit which deepens the separation between mother and daughter. I stood about, smiling, compressed, submerged in politeness; aching in my isolation; longing to be alone; to be away; to be tomorrow's person This entry was posted on September 3, 2012 at 10:49 am and is filed under reading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Molly Keane had two careers as a writer. She took up writing out of sheer boredom at seventeen when she was confined to bed with an illness in the early 1920s. She wrote as M J Farrell, a name she had seen over a pub door. She wanted to keep her writing secret as it would have been disapproved of in her social circle in Ireland: Good Behaviour includes very little good behavior, featuring instead delicious and deleterious accounts of illicit sex and wild high jinks, and a mother-daughter duo who can scrap with the best of them.” So, no, definitely, no, I didn't like Molly Keane's characters, including the young Aroon. I only enjoy reading stories, real or fictional, about characters who raise themselves and raise me with them. Our good behaviour went on and on, endless as the days. No one spoke of the pain we were sharing. Our discretion was almost complete. for a woman to read a book, let alone write one was viewed with alarm: I would have been banned from every respectable house in Co. Carlow."Simultaneously light and dark, pleasurable and harrowing, Good Behaviour may appeal chiefly to readers drawn to characters who are a mixture of well-meaning and hilariously vile, victimizer and victim. . . . Aroon St. Charles is Molly Keane’s great creation, Good Behaviour her masterpiece.” I really wish I had written this book. It’s a tragi-comedy set in Ireland after the First World War. A real work of craftsmanship, where the heroine is also the narrator, yet has no idea what is going on. You read it with mounting horror and hilarity as you begin to grasp her delusion. The book opens up to the present day of the life of Aroon St. Charles, 57 years of age. Her mother has just died from eating a rabbit mousse. She is deathly allergic to rabbit. Well, she is dead, so I guess the proof is in the pudding…oops, I meant mousse! 😝