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 Summer Will Show (New York Review Books Classics) $16.95 NYRB's reissue of one of Sylvia Townsend Warner's greatest novels could not be more welcome. Written after her conversion to communism the year before, Townsend Warner's 1936 novel is her most romantic, and shows the pleasures of abandoning yourself both to another heart and to a larger political cause (and indeed the two are often conflated in the novel). SUMMER WILL SHOW is not as formally innovative as Townsend Warner's next novel, THE CORNER THAT HELD THEM, but it may well be more challenging because of its intellectual sophistication: though this is a love story and a historical novel, it is also very much a novel of ideas. Its heroine, Sophia Willoughby, enjoys a great measure of independence living at her ancestral mansion Blandamer House overseeing the management of the estate and the raising of her two children. Her rakish husband spends most of his time in London, or in Paris seeing his mysterious mistress; this is largely as Sophia prefers it because his absence allows her to do largely as she pleases. But when smallpox carries away both children in 1847 in the novel's bravura first section, Sophia is left without much purpose in life, and she surprises herself the next Feburary by traveling to Paris to see if her husband will grant her more children. And then she surprises herself again by falling in love with his mistress, Minna, an extremely ugly but mesmerizing storyteller who is also a leading figure in the February 1848 revolution against Louis-Phillipe. The third and fourth sections of the novel have their longeurs as far as action goes, but they are absolutely essential to the meaning of the novel. Townsend Warner's characters never do or say quite what you'd expect (or what they would), and the movement of their ideas--and of Sophia's character--is so complex as to be nearly impossible to chart out. Yet nothing here feels forced or unnatural. This is one of the smartest books of the 1930s, and absolutely essential to understanding how British writers of the period were attracted to the promises of international communism particularly during the Spanish Civil War.  MovieWeb News - Celebrity, Film, TV, DVD and Blu-ray News $1.99 MovieWeb provides obsessive coverage of filmed entertainment. If it's on the big screen, the small screen or any other screen, you'll find the latest info, news and coverage on MovieWeb.Kindle blogs are fully downloaded onto your Kindle so you can read them even when you're not wirelessly connected. And unlike RSS readers which often only provide headlines, blogs on Kindle give you full text content and images, and are updated wirelessly throughout the day. |
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