The Pursuit of Love

Fanny Logan narrates the story of her cousin, Linda Radlett, the central character in The Pursuit of Love. The Radletts are a curious and wealthy family, and the children grow up between the wars in England. Fanny writes, “Linda was not only my favourite cousin, but, then and for many years, my favourite human being.” The Radletts are a large family; (t)he great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life's essential unfairness.” “But, while they (the Radletts) picked up a great deal of heterogeneous information, and gilded it with their own originality, while they bridged gulfs of ignorance with their charm and high spirits, they never acquired any habit of concentration, they were incapable of solid hard work.” Yes, odd, but charming and fun.

I delighted in the characters and in the subtle humor of the writing. Here's a little example, with Linda describing her attempts to take on doing housework for the first time during her second marriage to a poor man: “But oh how dreadful it is, cooking, I mean. That oven—Christian puts things in and says: ‘Now you take it out in about half an hour.' I don't dare tell him how terrified I am, and at the end of half an hour I summon up all my courage and open the oven, and there is that awful hot blast hitting one in the face. I don't wonder people sometimes put their heads in and leave them out of sheer misery. Oh, dear, and I wish you could have seen the Hoover running away with me, it suddenly took the bit between its teeth and made for the lift shaft. How I shrieked—Christian only just rescued me in time.”

Some of the funniest lines are Linda's thoughts about revolutionaries of her time:

“And Left-wing people are always sad because they mind dreadfully about their causes, and the causes are always going so badly.”

“He was really only interested in mass wretchedness, and never much cared for individual cases, however genuine their misery, while the idea that it is possible to have three square meals a day and a roof and yet be unhappy or unwell, seemed to him intolerable nonsense.”

It's a light comedy but with tragic overtones. And now I'm adding the sequel, Love in a Cold Climate, to my future reading list.