CHINA COURT
RUMER GODDEN
Open Road Media (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$1.99 sale price! Go get one!
Rating: 3.875* of five
The Publisher Says (flap copy of my mother's 1961 Viking Press edition): In this intricately plotted novel of a Cornish country house and the five generations who have peopled it, the story of American-reared Tracy Quin's homecoming is intertwined with the stories of her ancestors. Tracy comes home to visit her grandmother on the day after old Mrs. Quin dies, and becomes involved in the question of what will happen to China Court, the house she loves, which is hopelessly outdated and requires a great deal of repair—repair for which there is no money.
The old stories rise one by one as Tracy's unfolds—the story of lonely, brilliant Eliza; of Jared and Lady Patrick's fragile, bitter marriage; of Borowis and John Henry and old Mrs. Quin herself, when she was beautiful young Ripsie and an outsider to the family. As the lives of those who loved China Court are unfolded, the question of what will happen to the house becomes even more pressing, and soon only Tracy and Mrs. Quin's young tenant Peter St. Omer stand in the way of its destruction.
Serialized in the Ladies' Home Journal in 1960.
My Review: When I was a youngster, my mother had a lot of books from the 1930s to the 1960s on her shelves. I was allowed to roam freely among them, because she said that if I was old enough to want to read something, I should be able to do so.
As one can imagine, the large majority of a mother's bookshelf wasn't all that appealing to a young boy...Taylor Caldwell, Mary Lasswell, Anya Seton, Kathleen Winsor, and Rumer Godden were all well-represented. I called them, collectively, "snoozer biddies." Lots of long-face about loves lost, and noble sacrifices in the name of love, and mothers Doing Their All for Their Children, and blah blah blah blah.
Forty years later, I picked up China Court at the prompting of memory and the LT connection cloud bringing Rumer Godden's name back up to me. I half-remember some plot points, I do remember thinking that the rest of the snoozer biddies shoulda talked to this lady, she knew her onions comes to writin', and this was a good story.
It's a really good story! I think family sagas always appealed to me, and that's why this book snuck past the general opprobrium of youthful disdain heaped on the other books.
Not everyone in this book is likable, in fact most of them are pretty skeevy...motivated by greed, lust, vengeful meanness, thence to do some extraordinarily good things, and some cruel ones too. It reminded me then, and does also now, of my own family.
China Court is a house. It's not some Stately Manor, it's a big, old-fashioned family house. In the early 1960s, big places like this were in a serious period of desuetude in England. This book chronicles the house and the family's intertwined fates at this now-very-distant moment of crisis. It's structured in echo of the Book of Hours that Mrs. Quin, the last nineteenth-century native to live in the house, treasured and apparently read often. A Book of Hours, for the non-Catholic, divides the day into periods of prayer. Most of us have heard the terms "Lauds" and "Prime" (in the non-Amazon sense) and so forth, but these are just words...the idea of them, their purpose, is to give a reverential and spiritual cast to a person's every day and every act.
Speaking as a practicing anti-Christian, I think this is one of the best, most missed, ideas that modernity has rendered obsolete. I think, if this system of spiritual organization were to be reintroduced, the number of people who *actually* understood the religion they profess would rise exponentially, and I am just optimist enough to hope that there would be a corresponding reduction in the amount of loathsome hate-speech emanating from them.
As a narrative force in this novel, I think it's excellent and inspired. I think Rumer Godden deserves the attention of today's readers for her technical talent, her spiritual message, and her ahead-of-the-curve ideas. I recommend this to you.
