Mitfordian mischief: Darling, by India Knight, reviewed

It takes chutzpah to tackle a national treasure as jealously loved and gatekept as Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. Purists greeted last year’s television adaptation much as cat-owners might welcome a partially eviscerated mouse. I avoided watching, because the Wes Andersonification of my greatest literary succour seemed likely to burst every vein in my eyeballs. Can India Knight pull it off?

The bones remain intact. Beautiful, guileless aristocrat Linda Radlett falls disastrously in love with a rich banker and then a broke radical before finding happiness with an urbane Frenchman. But plot was never really the point. The delight is in the details.

Knight’s are bang on, and there’s joy in spotting them. The Radlett family become rock royalty, exiled in deepest Norfolk. Only two bars of signal in an abandoned pig ark connect the home-schooled siblings and the narrator, cousin Franny (no longer Fanny, understandably), to the outside world. Irascible patriarch Uncle Matthew is a reformed rock star and his notorious Great War entrenching tool a bloodstained Brit award he used to brain a drummer while ‘high on pharmaceutical-grade cocaine’. His violently arbitrary, Nicky Haslam-style hatreds pepper the pages: enoki mushrooms, thin socks or open-mouthed Instagrammers. Linda’s dud husbands are the fleshily handsome son of a Ukip peer (looking ‘like he lives off parma ham and cream, like an old woman’s bloody cat’, Uncle Matthew fulminates) and an Etonian anti-capitalist.

Some tweaks reflect contemporary sensibilities: sea swimming replaces hunting, and most of the characters have jobs: Linda runs a Dalston café, and her one true love, Fabrice, owns chic boutique hotels. Linda’s daughter Moira (deathlessly described by Mitford as a ‘howling orange in a fine black wig’) is gaily abandoned in the original; here she remains a beloved, if semi-detached, family member.