📚'Rather Dated' June: Margaret Kennedy's 'The Feast'📚

[MotherofPearl]

Link to main thread:

📚The Mumsnet 'Rather Dated' Book Group - All welcome to join📚 http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/whatweree_reading/4624300-the-mumsnet-rather-dated-book-group-all-welcome-to-join

Place-marking with a glass of hock 🍷

Thanks for the new thread, MotherofPearl.

Welcome to the Mumsnet 'Rather Dated' book club. This month we are reading Margaret Kennedy's 'The Feast'. Please do add your thoughts when you are ready.

About the threads:

We are reading and discussing fiction from the 1930s to the 1990s that would have been described as 'contemporary' in its day. We are reading one book a month. Spoilers are permitted!

We started the chat thanks to a thread where we kicked off with a discussion of Penelope Lively, The Road to Lichfield.

Currently we have these separate threads:
November: Anita Brookner, A Start in Life
December: Margaret Drabble: A Summer Bird-Cage
January: Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Beautiful Visit.
March: Winifred Watson, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.
April: R.C. Sheriff, The Fortnight in September.
May: Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont.

Thanks @FuzzyCaoraDhubh. I was interrupted after I started the thread so just coming back to add the opening posts.

I finished The Feast a couple of weeks ago, and have since read another Margaret Kennedy (The Forgotten Smile). I will write a proper review tomorrow, but I absolutely loved The Feast. I think it's my favourite of the Rather Dated books we've read so far on here. Very much looking forward to hearing what everyone else thinks too.

I read this last year and looking forward to reading everyone's comments. I have also given it as presents to a couple of people including my 86 year old mum who then got her book to do it!

I hope I will be able to remember all the things I loved about The Feast, as I finished it a few weeks ago.

I found the premise - knowing that it would end with the collapse of the hotel, but not knowing who would survive - made the novel absolutely gripping. I really couldn't put it down, and all the way through, as I got to know the characters, I found myself desperately hoping for some to survive (the Cove children; Nancibel; Mrs Paley; Evangeline), and some to perish (Mrs Cove and the Canon, mainly).

On the whole the characters who were morally good did survive, and in that sense it felt like a morality tale. Was Mr Siddal's fate uncertain? I wasn't sure if the implication was that he'd got far enough away from the hotel at the end or not?

The characters felt very vivid to me, especially Nancibel. I also enjoyed the period detail and some of the post-war shifting class dynamics.

I enjoyed The Feast very much. It was a clever premise and I wasn't sure either who would make it to the feast; who would be saved and who would perish until it was almost over. Mr and Mrs Siddal's lives (souls, if you consider it as heaven and hell) were in the balance. They barely made it. It could have gone either way for them, I think.

I thought an air of menace was pervasive from beginning to end and it reminded me of an Agatha Christie book in that regard. The malevolence of Mrs Cove watching her children preparing to dive into deep waters was very chilling. Thankfully the goodness and generosity of Nancibel and Mrs Paley offset this evil spirit. I think she really was one of the worst ones. Nancibel was very likeable and vividly drawn as you say, MotherofPearl.

I read in a review on Goodreads that the ones who perished had a clue in their names to suggest which of the deadly sins they represented. I wouldn't have guessed it, but it is obvious once you know. Did anyone figure it out?

I'm didn't @FuzzyCaoraDhubh . I read the prologue quite a while before the rest of the book and then had some other distractions. I read about it on Goodreads too. (I love to see all the different ratings and opinions after I've read a book and usually find someone has thought the exact same as me and worded it well)

Anyway, after reading the seven deadly sins bit I thought was it the way I read it? Am I entirely dim? It makes perfect sense. Glad to see I'm not the only one that missed it!

Do you know, @tobee, I skipped over the foreword in case of spoilers and I never went back to it, so thanks for mentioning it!

Hang on just re read, the names and their characters were the sins.

As I say, I read it last year, so my memory is quite faded, but I enjoyed the mixture of quite believable aspects, intermeshed with almost parable qualities.

Probably her most famous work is The Constant Nymph. Has anyone read it? I looked up the plot because I've known the title forever but it seemed very melodramatic and not humorous. Maybe because it was written in 1924 compared to The Feast being 1949. See also it was a play starring Noel Coward and then John Gielgud in the West End. Can imagine a revival of The Constant Nymph would be a dated period piece. Whereas The Feast is so appealing today.

It looks like I was wrong about Siddal. He was named as a victim in the conversation between the two Reverends.

Yes he was Sloth.

That was a weird idea, him living in that cubby hole thing. I kept trying to visualise it. That's what I mean about the quite realistic elements and the bizarre presumably symbolic elements.

I really enjoyed this book. I did read the foreword so I knew about the premise, but I don’t think I’d have picked it up had I not been tipped off….so presumably Anna Lechene was lechery? Mrs Cove…covet etc. Anyway, it made me laugh a lot, and I enjoyed Margaret Kennedy's sly sense of humour.

The Constant Nymph was filmed a couple of times too - very melodramatically in the 1940's version, if the film trailer is anything to go by!

Ooh thanks for that link @Terpsichore

I first read The Constant Nymph over 30 years ago and absolutely loved it and reread it many times. It does have some humorous bits, even if the overall outcome is sad. I can't imagine a revival as I think the central relationship would be problematic today - he is an adult probably late 20s at least and she is about 14 - although totally unconsummated.

I read The Feast about 2 years ago because I was looking for holiday reading while in Cornwall and that seemed appropriate. I did enjoy it very much and didn't spot the character names thing. Think I will have to have another look.

I have only read one othef Margaret Kennedy, Red Sky at Morning. I say read. I made it only a few chapters in and face up on it.

*gave up on it

Thank you for the link, Terpsichore. Fascinating. Love the old trailers. 'Let me tell you about the picture I'm making...' Now I want to read The Constant Nymph 😄I agree that The Feast has aged better and still has appeal for a modern audience. The review* *I came across in Goodreads suggested that the book is a cross between an Agatha Christie, The Fortnight in September and another book that I don't know.

Joan Fontaine was 26 when she played the teen Tessa in The Constant Nymph, and that was after Rebecca!

I found this a very satisfied somehow, one of those books that seems to have so much meat in it. I raced through it, and was not happy at the diminishing number of pages left. It is such an unusual premis: “Cornwall, summer 1947, a buried seaside hotel”, and yet it is also a good read about recognisable people. I think that’s what impressed me the most about the book, the fact that Margaret Kennedy is writing basically a metaphor about the seven deadly sins, which also works very successfully as a novel in its own right. The other very clever thing was the structure, where the reader knows the hotel collapses but not who survives. The characters were well drawn and didn’t feel like metaphors even though I retrospectively had fun working out who was which sin. Loved Nancibel and the child characters, hated Mrs Cove. I read The Constant Nymph afterwards, which was a lot less sophisticated I felt, although I suppose that’s unsurprising as it was written so much earlier.

Sorry the first line should say a very satisfying read!

Really enjoying reading everyone's comments. I agree @StellaOlivetti that the Seven Deadly Sins metaphor is so well done. If someone said here's a novel in which the main characters embody the Seven Deadly Sins, I'd imagine something pretty turgid and sententious, but instead the novel is an absolutely riveting read and the characters so compelling.

There was no preaching about it either, it was very matter of fact. This is what people are like. I agree with Terpsichore that Kennedy has a sly sense of humour. I also enjoyed the Reverend's attempts to write his sermon and all the bad typing.

Yes, exactly, and you phrase it much more elegantly than me, @MotherofPearl ! It is riveting, and in the hands of a lesser novelist may well have been. I’ve just watched the trailer for The Constant Nymph. It’s very … overwrought! Quite surprised that Lewis Dodd was French.

May well not have been … what’s wrong with my brain this morning

Oh yes, I loved the badly-typed sermon! That felt unexpectedly modern in a book of the 1940s. As did the very casual way we were told that Anna was sleeping with the chauffeur (sorry, can’t remember his name, I had to return my library copy of the book) - no great moral outrage, just an acknowledgment that people are fallible and do behave in ways other people might not like.

(Stella, I don’t think Lewis Dodd was French, I assume they just decided to cast Charles Boyer!)