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Curious Relations
1945. First Published. 175 pages. Pictorial dust jacket over light brown cloth. Binding remains firm. Pages have light tanning and foxing throughout. Pencil inscription and pen mark to front free endpaper. Boards have light shelf-wear with corner bumping. Very slight crushing to spine ends. Clipped jacket has heavy edgewear with areas of loss, heavy tears, chips, and creasing. Light tanning to spine and edges. Light foxing overall.
210 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1947
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 9, 2021
Humourous telling of a ridiculous family, but without any actual plot or MC, it got dull and irrelevant.
September 25, 2018
“The Mountfaucons were the last of a grand English family, still very rich but in rapid decline...They were all natural art-haters...Generally speaking, out of every epoch they had succeeded in salvaging everything that was least lovely.”
Probably what Graham Greene would have called “an entertainment”, Curious Relations offers anecdotes and incidents from the fictional lives of two ancient but fictional families – the Mountfaucons and the d’Arfeys – purporting to be the ancestors of one William d’Arfey, the pen-name under which this novel was originally published.
Anthony Butts, William Plomer’s partner, was a painter not a writer, but he seems to have contributed something to these stories – perhaps based on his own family history. Certainly the d’Arfeys are placed in a house suspiciously similar to the Butts’ family home in Poole Harbour and there observe birds, including “great black crimson-headed woodpeckers” – not creatures frequently mentioned in novels but iconic in sister Mary’s Armed With Madness. Plomer himself returned to the families for his novel Museum Pieces, in which genteel Edwardians fail to adapt to the modern world.
If Curious Relations has a serious side, it is the depiction of the closure of a long era of privileged wealth and rigid class distinctions – both of which are the butt of Plomer’s mild and civilized satire. But for the most part it is a series of anecdotes about English eccentrics who never existed. Amusing when real, as in Lord Berners’ entertaining autobiographies, but a bit lightweight as fiction.
Probably what Graham Greene would have called “an entertainment”, Curious Relations offers anecdotes and incidents from the fictional lives of two ancient but fictional families – the Mountfaucons and the d’Arfeys – purporting to be the ancestors of one William d’Arfey, the pen-name under which this novel was originally published.
Anthony Butts, William Plomer’s partner, was a painter not a writer, but he seems to have contributed something to these stories – perhaps based on his own family history. Certainly the d’Arfeys are placed in a house suspiciously similar to the Butts’ family home in Poole Harbour and there observe birds, including “great black crimson-headed woodpeckers” – not creatures frequently mentioned in novels but iconic in sister Mary’s Armed With Madness. Plomer himself returned to the families for his novel Museum Pieces, in which genteel Edwardians fail to adapt to the modern world.
If Curious Relations has a serious side, it is the depiction of the closure of a long era of privileged wealth and rigid class distinctions – both of which are the butt of Plomer’s mild and civilized satire. But for the most part it is a series of anecdotes about English eccentrics who never existed. Amusing when real, as in Lord Berners’ entertaining autobiographies, but a bit lightweight as fiction.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews