📚The Mumsnet 'Rather Dated' Book Group - All welcome to join📚

[Antarcticant]

Welcome to the Mumsnet 'Rather Dated' Book Group, where we will be reading and discussing fiction from the 1930s to the 1990s that would have been described as 'contemporary' in its day.

The best introduction to the 'rather dated' concept would be to read the wonderful thread which inspired this group:

www.mumsnet.com/talk/what_were_reading/4596284-rather-dated?reply=119670989

To summarise, a number of posters expressed disappointment that literature of the 20th Century is often dismissed as 'rather dated' because society has moved on from many of the values and lifestyles described.

We decided to create a reading group where the literary merits of such fiction can be appreciated, with any 'rather dated' elements being a point of interest rather than a reason to dismiss a novel.

We will be reading one book a month. Our first book, for September, will be the book that inspired the original thread:

The Road to Lichfield by Penelope Lively

Please do join the thread whether you want to take part in the discussion or just place mark to follow it.

Fellow Rather Dated people, please add anything important I might have missed!

(With huge thanks to ImJustMadAboutSaffron for the original thread and idea )

Excellent idea. Love Penelope Lively and re read her regularly.

I think today is the day our discussion of The Road to Lichfield can begin?

Yes, indeed, thank you for opening this up @MotherofPearl

For October's book, Black Narcissus seems to have the most approval so far - shall we go with that one?

This book was fabulous

Loved the late 70s nostalgia I felt when reading it having been a child in this era itms

Don seemed very tolerant and blasé about her indiscretion
Interesting about the changing of the village and the redevelopment of properties

Small print though

The period detail was interesting, the squaddies listening to their 'transistor radio' and the Span house. I did have a giggle at the neighbours with the farm implements as decoration when they didn't even know what they were, you got a sense that just a generation ago these villages around London were still stuck in the pre-industrial agricultural age and the middle classes were just beginning to move in. I loved how snobby they all were about recent architecture, Anne made negative comments about 1930s and Edwardian houses. My PILs are from the same generation as these characters and they were moving into unfashionable Victorian houses and doing them up around this time. Gentrification I suppose.

The other period detail I noticed was quite early on when David cut his hand and Anne was cleaning it and the narrative started focusing on the tap. That felt quite like the cinematography you'd expect in a scene from a 1970s TV series, I felt like I should be hearing discordant music while watching it.

What did everyone think about the relationship with David? Did it feel believable? I'm not sure it entirely did to me, I was surprised someone who was in a decent if slightly boring started an affair so quickly with someone she hardly knew and then introduced her daughter to him so early, Anne was very much in need of Mumsnet to tell her to give her head a shake.

I loved it. Yes, lots of period detail (or what feels like it to us, it must have been a very modern novel with its dissection of a modern marriage at the time) but also some things I recognised as unchanged in modern village life: the bossy committee woman, the group trying to save the cottage from demolition. Anne was interesting and rather sad. I got the feeling the affair with David wasn’t a grand passion, more a response to the deadness of her marriage with Don.

And there was this very funny bit early on which I underlined: Hers was the stocky, tireless physique of a peasant woman bowed over a cornfield in some nineteenth century painting; transposed into her large modern house in this tranquil commuter land, she seemed to dart hither and thither with the undirected energy of a clockwork toy.
I don’t live in commuter land, but apart from that I thought oh God, that’s me.

What I really enjoyed was that it was such a well-crafted book. It worked, so quietly and unobtrusively, on so many levels. Anne's father fades away as the season fades; her affair waxes and wanes in the space of a season, and that was done so well, the details of the landscape and the natural world evoking exactly the right images in my mind.

The treatment of time was well-handled, too - the way time telescopes and the past suddenly bumps up against the present, especially when you lose a parent. That’s a bit of a Lively theme, I think - it’s a big part of Moon Tiger too, isn’t it?

The bits that I found interestingly different to today were around Anne's relative detachment from her father. I know he'd been self-sufficient and in good health but she didn’t seem to know much about his life. The fact that he’d gone into a nursing-home seemed to come as a surprise to her…would people today be a bit more hands-on with their elderly parents, or maybe that’s just me? The children didn’t seem all that bothered that their grandfather was fading away either. But then maybe they hadn’t had a very close relationship.

Anyway, I did really enjoy it. I felt it put a lot of modern fiction to shame, to be honest.

It's such a sad and accurate account of the gradual decline of an elderly parent. I found the idea that we know our parents simply as our parents, and don't necessarily give much consideration to the idea that they are people in their own right, both true and well described. Anne, sorting through her father's papers in the study: "realised that he had been very good at his job" for the first time. She admits to herself that "so far as I am concerned - have been concerned - he existed to be my father, and now one finds that was not the case at all, or only a small part of it." Discovering his affair is just part of this subtle realisatuon that there's so much about her father she simply didn't know. And now it's too late to make sense of it all.

The affair with David starts off as a relationship that feels very different from Anne's marriage to Don, and yet gradually they start to irritate one another and the longing to be together decreases until there's very little left to value. Don's pragmatic and rather emotionless reaction towards the end of the book reminded me of the final scene of Brief Encounter when the husband implies that he has been aware of his wife's attraction to someone else. "Thank you for coming back to me" is his last statement and this sort of understatement is frequently found in TRTL too.

Penelope Lively can capture our domestic life so accurately and her use of language is sharp. Anyone who has tried to summon up the energy for some serious decluttering will recognise "all those cupboards, hugging their menace of old clothes, exercise books, dolls, bricks , small cars .... postcards, photographs."

And finally, I love Glasgow so I have to assume that: "Glasgow, of course, was to be avoided" was an example of PL's dry sense of humour

I really enjoyed The Road to Lichfield as well. I thought the writing was very masterful and well-crafted for the reasons that Terpsichore outlined. The writing flowed really well. It was seamless.

I thought the portrayal of illness and old age was sensitively done through the eyes of Anne's ailing father. I agree that her father checking into a nursing home by himself was surprising and not something that would happen today, I don't think.

I thought there was a parallel between Anne's affair and her father's affair. It wasn't that they were unhappy at home, but that they both found a more sympathetic partner later in life. Anne and David seemed to have a lot in common as history teachers and Don came across as hardworking but dull. Whatever had brought them together (it seemed like he was a good, stable choice?) had fizzled out.

There was a lot of reflection about making important life decisions and living with the consequences and I also liked the occasional humour; ' You wouldn't be larking about after twenty years of marriage now?' asks busybody Sandra to a blushing Anne. Also, 25p for a present for Susan still makes me smile :)

It was a very domestic novel. I enjoyed Anne's discovery of her father's world and his professional/extra-marital life, and the fishing friend. Her affair with David, and its fading out seemed organic. Her teenage children were authentically self-centred. The detailed domesticity was perfect.

Just been skimming these and will read properly in a bit. But wanted to say before I forget did anyone find the bit with meeting the dad's mistresses family slightly jarring? It felt a bit odd to me that it was the daughter who wasn't the dad's daughter? I don't know it was interesting and different, and you could understand Anne's motivation to meet her, but idk, just seemed a let down almost.

I finished the book a while ago and will read what I put on Goodreads immediately after to jog my memory.

I'll get ready to download Black Narcissus to my Kindle.

it was actually quite shocking to me as someone who is-old
enough to remember that era although as a child.
the book seemed so middle class and strangely repressed despite the affairs although i struggle to say why.
What resonated with me was the way the children were not a subject of angst they were just children. (teenaged) and utterly controlled by the parents. That is how I recall that era. her comment to her daughter to not eat the bread as it's so fattening was was one of the only comment s i recall being directed to the children. And i have no doubt that would not be in a contemporary novel unless it was somehow being abusive.
cars breaking down and endless driving instructions re roads were very evocative of that whole era.
It really was a step back in time and made me very glad i'm no longer in that time

I

I found those comments to the daughter fascinating. I'm sure they'd horrify a lot of younger readers. But what I end up thinking is what are the current generation,and generations to come, saying now that people will be shocked by in 30, 40, 50 years time?

Talking of the children, I thought it was interesting that neither child went to the funeral; I think it would be rather unusual for teenagers nowadays not to be at a grandparent’s funeral. Of course it allowed their parents to have their quietly explosive dinner on the journey home.

I very much enjoyed the thread running through the novel about the past and how best to relate to it - from the headteacher abolishing History O’ level to the campaign to preserve the ancient cottage - particularly as I recently read a book about the archaeology of Gloucester, much of which was quite casually destroyed relatively recently.

I thought the meeting between Anne and the daughter of her father’s mistress was deliberately anti-climatic @tobee While Anne did find out new and unexpected things about her father, the complete truth - about who her father was, and what the relationship between her parents was really like - eluded her, as it eludes everyone.

Yes I agree about the history thread being one of the most interesting parts of the novel. This is a theme of PL's I think - deploring the use of history and historical artefacts that are decontextualised and sanitised, and urging an engagement with history that takes full account of its messy complexities. I think another of her themes is to highlight our tendency to idealise and romanticise the countryside.

I loved the tone of the book. I also really enjoyed the part about Coventry catgerdral, when it was obviously new. I lived near there in my early 20s and the descriptions were perfect, especially the turning around to see the stained glass windows (I love it!)

I'm loving reading all your comments on the novel. Lots of my own thoughts have already been expressed. MotherofPearl's comment on the history thread running throughout was spot on.

I was born around the time the novel was written and many of the changes to the landscape documented in the novel (flyovers, housing estates...) were things I have always known, so it was interesting to read how many people must have felt at the time.

The couple with the old farm implements in their living room I found quite comedic!

At the risk of going all Freudian, I wonder how much of Anna's attraction to David was due to his friendship with her father?

Also, I'm not sure what to make of her brother. Would the novel have been any less interesting without him? What narrative role does he play? As a foil to dull-as-ditch water Don?

Talking of Don, I found that last scene quite chilling. A dark horse indeed.

So pleased the next one is Black Narcissus. I loved the old B&W film and am looking forward to reading the novel now.

I loved this book.

Initially I was disappointed by the ending - that Anne would just settle back into her humdrum marriage with Dom. But actually, on reflection, I appreciated it more and more. That's her life and her life choice - and the different roads she drives past on her way up and down to see her father also represent the choices that she could have taken in her life.

Ultimately, I thought, even for that generation of women, choices beyond 'safe' marriage were still limited. And Anne doesn't have her father and no longer has David - but she does have Don.

Yes. It was a very poignant book.

I've read a few Penelope Lively books and really like her style of writing but I'm afraid I didn't think this was one of her best. I liked her exploration of history and memory (as Terpsichore points out, a recurrent theme in her books) but I think it was done much better in, for example, Moon Tiger*. I didn't warm to any of the characters and found Anne rather irritating; this isn't necessarily a problem but I also didn't engage with them. That said, as a woman of a certain age, I did enjoy and recognise many of the period details.

Highlandcoo I like your comparison of the ending with Brief Encounter.

Sorry for the mad bolding, I must have missed out an asterisk.

Ah, @MotherofPearl, you’ve articulated it so much better than me. And @CalmConfident the section about Coventry Cathedral is brilliant. I also liked the way the younger Anne used it as a way to define herself against her father’s views; Lively writes so well about family dynamics. I agree with you @apalershadeoflight Don turned out to be quite the manipulator (cf. the move to a higher-status house).

Divorce certainly wasn’t uncommon in the 70s, but I think it was still more socially unacceptable, and Anne and David would definitely have been considered the ‘guilty parties’. They were also very devoted parents, and had very settled, if dull in Anne’s case, unhappy in David’s, lifestyles.

I seem to be in the minority here but I had mixed feelings about the book. I'm the same age as Anne and I found some of the observations about that stage of life quite penetrating - in particular, there was a comment about how the decisions you make when you're young have so much bearing on your future life, but at that point you don't have the wisdom to make them. I quite liked the meditations on history and memory, and how little children can really know their parents.

My main problem with the novel was the male characters. I thought Don was absolutely awful, the way he just ignored and patronised Anne. Even at the end when he discovers she's had an affair he simply puts it down to her having had a difficult time with her father dying, and just continues to ignore her. For this reason I found the ending incredibly depressing. I remember a comment earlier in the book when she reflects on her marriage and says they've been perfectly happy.... and then that they don't talk to each other a great deal. Not really my idea of perfectly happy. I really wanted Anne to leave him, even if the relationship with David didn't work out.

I also found the love affair with David pretty unconvincing. I couldn't really understand the basis for their attraction, he seemed a fairly dull middle-aged man not too dissimilar to her husband (and he faints at the sight of blood - honestly!) There was really nothing sexy about their relationship.

And what was the point of Graham? He seemed to be mostly there as a foil to Anne's choices. He has chosen a different path not including marriage or children, and the book implies he's starting to regret it. But he was a fairly irritating character too.

I also agree that it was not especially believable to think that Anne and David, engaged in an illicit relationship, would introduce their teenage children to each other.