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

Product Information

Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour presents a character whose own strict Christian code wreaks havoc on all those around her. There’s a battle between the generations, a shadow cast by the First World War, financial difficulties and a persistent worry about inheritance. To Aroon St Charles, large and unlovely daughter of the house, the fierce forces of sex, money, jealousy and love seem locked out by the ritual patterns of good behaviour. She can give as much as she takes, reminiscing to her retainer and erstwhile lover, Oliver: ‘You were so sad and sweet when we found you, that last lovely spring before the war, all alone in the Austrian Tyrol – and a gentian in your hat.

She grew up at Ballyrankin House on the side of River Slaney, a few miles south east of Bunclody, County Wexford [5] and refused to go to boarding school in England as her siblings had done. It was all the more shocking thanks to the way Aroon refuses to let the narrative even so much as pause to let us give these moments our full attention.

Bowen’s novel is also gloriously stylised, but she takes as her model Shakespearean comedy, with postwar rural Ireland standing in for the Forest of Arden, rather than satire.

Seeing her own name on that makeshift coffin, Molly knew how near she had come to sharing that fate. International postal rates are calculated on a book weighing 1 Kilo, in cases where the book weighs more than 1 Kilo increased postal rates will be quoted, where the book weighs less then postage will be reduced accordingly. English boarding-school, however, instilled in me the niceties of what can and cannot, should and should not be said. Sex (and there is a lot of it), masturbation, pregnancy, murder, suicide – none of it is named, so that reading the book is rather like reading a detective story, in which clues have to be picked up and decoded, or a murder mystery (lots of people die in questionable circumstances), which you have to interpret backwards while you are reading forwards.If she hadn't been nominated for the Booker prize in 1981, this novel would have escaped my attention, and that of many other readers, I suspect. Molly Keane allows Aroon (whose Irish name, with perfect irony, means ‘my beloved’) to chronicle the preceding history and, in so doing, chart the self-destructive double-standards which masquerade as good behaviour.

Charles prepares to serve her invalid mother a splendid luncheon—the silver gleams, the linens glow—of rabbit mousse, a dish her mother despises.An unnamed friend remembers “darts thrown with extraordinary lethal accuracy like the banderoles of a skilled picador”.