Stories and films set in stately homes continue to fascinate us, and Lissa Evans’s latest novel is likely to increase our appetite. It is 1945, and Dimperley Manor, the large, dilapidated home of the Vere-Thissetts near Aylesbury, has been almost emptied of its wartime evacuees. Only the widowed Zena Baxter (who adores Dimperley) and her small daughter remain, and the place has become a millstone round the neck of the heir, Valentine. The new baronet is expected to marry a rich bride to save his ancestral home. The nation, battered and bloodied, has just voted overwhelmingly for Labour. Is it a new dawn or a disaster?
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All this might seem familiar to fans of Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, Hannah Rothschild and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. The mad relations living under one giant leaky roof, the shabby furnishings, brown tap water and discomforts of being cash-poor, snobbish and servantless are what render the subjects of class and property entertaining. But in the hands of Evans, one of our finest writers of literary entertainment, this all becomes more than an exercise in nostalgia. The second world war formed the background of her previous novels, including Their Finest (which was successfully filmed in 2016) and V for Victory. Here she shows how the war’s disruption to ordinary lives prepared the ground for everything in today’s Britain, from the welfare state to feminism. Soldiers are being demobbed and the age of Attlee has replaced that of Churchill, signalling change that will continue into our own time.
Inevitably, Dimperley’s aristocrats are mildly satirised. Their foibles and ineptitude are seen through the eyes of Zena, a tough, poor, practical single mother with a gift for organisation. She falls in love with Dimperley due to its resemblance to the estate in E. Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle; but she is less impressed by the family, especially once she comes to realise that although they might seem to her ‘the poshest people imaginable’ they are in fact ‘on the lowest rung of the nobs’ ladder’. Valentine, too, has challenges. Wounded in an accident, the reluctant baronet (nicknamed ‘Thickie’ by former schoolfellows) has been convinced that he is stupid, due to undiagnosed dyslexia, and dismissed by his own family. How can these two unlikely heroes take on a house which lacks architectural harmony, a sufficient income and, in the case of Valentine’s family, common sense?
The formidable Lady Vere-Thissett; her mentally handicapped son Cedric; Alaric, her brother-in-law obsessed by the history of Dimperley; Valentine’s widowed sister-in-law, Barbara, and her teenaged daughters; Zena’s precocious five-year-old Allison, plus a number of dogs all wander in and out of a house that has ‘at least one stuffed animal in almost every room’. Their demands and frustrations are hard to sympathise with but easy to laugh at.
Yet war, rather than class, is really Evans’s focus, and her evocation of this time reveals quintessentially British vices and virtues that are not just comic tropes. How did ordinary people, trying to hold body and soul together, survive? The answer is by lying, stealing and cheating. How will women who have flown Spitfires during the war cope when ‘nobody’s going to employ a woman when they can give a job to a returning hero’? What will the Labour landslide mean for those who have hung on for the hope of better housing and jobs in peace time? Dimperley itself is a metonym for Britain in its battered incompetence and outdated assumptions. Is it doomed to be demolished or can it be rescued?
As in the best of country house fiction, the cleverness of this novel is that it is more than its setting and cast. Like Cold Comfort Farm, it is about the encounter between order and chaos: there is no funnier subject, because if it goes wrong the results can be disastrous. The small bomb at Dimperley is all too real and waiting to explode, but it is a question of when and where, and whether human beings have any agency. The efficient, judgmental and homeless Zena teeters on the brink of obnoxious bossiness, and the hopelessly romantic, privileged Valentine is exasperatingly passive. If they remain this way, they are lost; but each could complement the other if a leap of imagination and trust is made.
Meanwhile, their differences are what propels this delicious entertainment, which, like much genuinely comic, beautifully written fiction, will be as loved by readers as it is rejected by the judges of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. Its prevailing spirit – perhaps for our own new political era too – is not one of class hatred, revenge and despair but of energy, generosity and hope.
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