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

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It is obvious to the reader that Aroon’s father isn’t ‘sadly unoccupied’, but that he is dwelling on the horror of war, of having shot his mutilated servant to put him out of his misery. She didn’t do ‘perhaps’, ‘quite’, ‘maybe’ or ‘rather’ and, although she is celebrated for the comedy of Good Behaviour, her plots and characterization are bracing and unsentimental, even risky. A narrator in denial; a style purged of description; a plot never spelled out; a love that dares not speak its name. The bills are mounting, the house is crumbling and the servants are impertinent, but the family maintains an unshakeable, aristocratic façade.

As she wrote near the end of her life, ‘the Irish are sardonic often, lyrical often, but comic – never’. This copy is bright, tight, white and square, there are silk head and tail bands and blue endpapers. A couple​ of years ago Hilary Mantel was asked to pick an ‘overlooked classic’, and she chose Good Behaviour, praising the book’s concision, its wit and method of ‘sly misdirection’.Aroon has developed manners so finessed, so smotheringly good that they really will allow her to get away with murder. Our water supply was meagre and my grandfather had deflected a considerable quantity of it to a pond on which, in the shelter of a grove of rhododendrons, he loved to row himself about. He had shot Ollie Reilly as he lay mutilated and dying; when he talked to Rose, Ollie’s death seemed quite enviable, here and gone, out like a light. Illustrations by Debra McFarlane echo the novel's atmosphere of genteel decline and its subtle interplay between comedy and tragedy.

I n​ Molly Keane: A Life, her biography of her mother from 2017, Sally Phipps records an occasion in the 1920s when a dead baby was found inside a hat box floating down the River Slaney.It is from first-hand experience that she has created these characters who adhere so impeccably to the code of ‘Good Behaviour’, and yet, by creating these dark jolting interruptions to the otherwise well-behaved narrative flow, she challenges the code. Discover the joy of reading with us, your trusted source for affordable books that do not compromise on quality.