1 The ending.
Somewhere around the middle of the book, Cassandra’s trying
to decide if she envies Rose or not. She says:
“When I imagine changing places with her I get the feeling I
do on finishing a novel with a brick-wall happy ending–I mean the kind of
ending when you never think any more about the characters.”
And so of course this book isn’t going to have that kind of
ending. I’m not going to spoil it for you, just in case there’s any chance you’re
reading this and you haven’t read ICTC, but let me tell you that Dodie Smith
provides an ending which could not be more perfect, leaving you looking
hopefully into the future with Cassandra and giving you plenty of scope for
thinking about all the characters. Thank goodness no publisher nagged her into
providing a sequel!
2 The sense of time.
The trouble with journal books and letter books is that
usually they don’t account for the amount of time the character has to spend
actually writing in between all the things they’re doing. In ICTC, we get the
sense of how long writing takes – sometimes Cassandra tells us that it has
taken her two or three days to complete an episode – and also a sense of her in
the present, as she writes: think of the first sentence, “I write this sitting
in the kitchen sink,” and the end, “Only the margin left to write on now. I
love you, I love you, I love you.” There are no slips: we learn straight away
that she’s practising speed-writing which is why she writes so much even before
anything begins to happen, the now around her is beautifully integrated with
the events she’s describing.
3 The evocation of a time gone by.
It didn’t occur to me when I first read this that it was
anything other than a contemporary novel when it was written. I was struck by
the differences between then and now: the idea of them living on hand-outs in a
castle, the treatment of Cassandra by everyone as if she were a child though
she’s 17 or 18 (it’s not made clear) and her – I can’t think what to call it –
backwardness? innocence? when it comes to men. The whole attitude to love and
marriage really: it all seems deliciously old-fashioned. The thing is though,
when you sit up and take notice, this is a book published in 1949 about the
1930s. By 1949, that decade before the war must have seemed like another world.
And once you realise that, you start to notice how much there is in the book
that’s there just to give you a glimpse of this other world. Think of the part when
Simon and Cassandra stand in the village taking in the sights and sounds and
smells, or the off-hand mention of the sheep in Hyde Park (it’s true, see http://www.peterberthoud.co.uk/2012/03/hyde-parks-shepherd-his-sheep/).
It’s a very conscious evocation of the past.
I could go on. I could tell you that it’s laugh-out-loud
funny in places and in others full of the joys and agonies of unrequited love.
I could witter on about the marvellously ‘captured’ characters and settings,
and the funny little digs at ‘arty’ people. I’ll stop now though, but for one
thing: read it or reread it. It’ll make you smile.
