After a lacklustre year of books programming, the low point being a serialisation of a middle-class family’s failed attempt to live without internet, Radio 4 has lately come into its own. Already this month we’ve been treated to Beware of Pity (which I wrote about here), the surprisingly enjoyable Gargantua and Pantagruel, Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dickens and Craig Taylor’s Londoners. This week it’s a Timberlake Wertenbaker adaptation of Possession and an early Christmas present, The Pusuit of Love by Nancy Mitford.
Many of us will have a comfort book, something we return to in times of illness, romantic strife, double dip recession and so on. Mine would have to be The Pursuit of Love, although I feel guilty calling it a comfort book, because it is so much more than that. I feel just as guilty admitting it makes me laugh and cry every time I read it, because – as well as sounding trite – this somehow undermines its intellectual credibility, already lower than it should be. This brilliantly funny and clever novel, while loved by millions, will never be seen as one of the pillars of twentieth-century fiction. It is badly let down by its frivolous-sounding title and the class, surname and sex of its author. It will always be a girls’ book.
Publishers over the years have done little to help. My own copy, a Penguin paperback edition, came out at the height of the chicklit/Bridget Jones era. “Utter, utter bliss” proclaims the Daily Mail quote on the front cover, while the blurb reads: “Oh the boredom of waiting to grow up! Longing for love, obsessed with weddings and sex, Linda and her sisters and cousin Fanny fantasize about the perfect lover. But finding Mr Right proves difficult…” The newest edition, also published by Penguin, has a wonderful introduction by Zoe Heller (which you can read here), but I can’t imagine many men would be enticed by its bubblegum-pink cover.
What a shame. Yes it is partly about growing up and falling in love, although neither of these is an intrinsically girlish subject. Yes it is gloriously, unapologetically Mitfordian – if the mere mention of the Hons cupboard makes you retch then maybe stay away. But this humane, perceptive novel is also an intelligent satire on the political currents that shaped the British ruling classes (ergo, Britain) in the 1930s. Nancy Mitford’s portrayal of upper-class Nazi sympathisers and champagne communists is spot-on (given her sisters, you wouldn’t expect anything less) and very, very funny.
My favourite bit is when Linda – the beautiful and romantic but also selfish and naïve heroine – is working in a communist bookshop. To the amazement of its owner, Boris, it starts making record profits. Little does he know that when he is out of the shop Linda replaces his dry political pamphlets with her own favourite books:
‘Thus for Whither British Airways? was substituted Round the World in Forty Days, Karl Marx, the Formative Years was replaced by The Making of a Marchioness, and The Giant of the Kremlin by Diary of a Nobody, while A Challenge to Coal-Owners made way for King Solomon’s Mines.’
Nancy Mitford dedicated The Pursuit of Love to her on-off French boyfriend, Gaston Palewski (their relationship is the subject of a recent book by Lisa Hilton) who appears in the novel in the guise of Linda’s lover, Fabrice, Duke of Sauveterre. My own reading of The Pursuit of Love continues to be skewed by first having read it during Fulham’s incredible 2000-1 season. Instead of seeing Fabrice as Mitford intended – a pock-marked, middle-aged womaniser and hero of the French resistance – I will always imagine him as the dazzlingly nimble yet infuriatingly petulant winger Fabrice Fernandes.
Anna Baddeley is editor of The Omnivore.
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