Reading Freely

Major Pettigrew’s entire life is being unsettled. He’d just suddenly lost his brother, and after the funeral, the Major’s self-absorbed and materialistic son arrives and declares his intentions to move closer to the village — along with his new finance, an even more shallow and materialistic American woman. The local lord, a man previously devoted to defending the countryside, is working on plans to turn parts of his estate into a new residential community, possibly displacing current residents. And then there’s Mrs. Ali, the shopkeeper’s widow who …who…..well, he’s having feelings for her, and it just won’t do. It won’t. Different cultures, and different classes, mustn’t be done. On the other hand, the love of an intelligent woman who loves reading as much as he does is worth looking like a silly ass with a schoolboy crush.

This is a conventional cozy-village-romance story, perfectly charming, of course. I read it thinking it was another Rachel Joyce novel and didn’t realize it wasn’t until I’d finished the thing — though I knew I wasn’t as into it as actual Joyce novels. I loved the major immediately, an older widower who strikes the right balance between being extremely attached to tradition and propriety, and openness: imagine David Horton with Hugo’s heart. (And further imagine Hugo was an absolutely vain, shallow ass, then you’ll have the dynamic between the Major and his son.) The Major is descended from a line of military men, and he has a strong attachment and devotion to his village. The major is here embroiled in one mess after another — arguing with his sister-in-law over settling the estate, despairing over his son’s selfishness and vanity, being pulled into absurd community events like a themed dance — all the while enjoying and distracted by a budding friendship that has a romantic charge. Simonson works in a great deal of ordinary human drama into a simple story: the Major’s awareness that age and death are coming for him, his concern about what he leaves behind him (both a son and a village threatened by redevelopment), the class and racial differences and tension that his growing connection to Mrs. Ali bring out, etc. Distinct but connecting to the Major’s story are others, like that of a young man who struggles with love and principle and responsibility, and of course — village politics. I’ll reread Simonson again — she has a recent one about lady flyers which looks promising.

Coming up: Microsoft’s embrace of Cloud/AI, and a novel about Spitfires.

Highlights:

It surprised him that his grief was sharper than in the past few days. He had forgotten that grief does not decline in a straight line or along a slow curve like a graph in a child’s math book. Instead, it was almost as if his body contained a big pile of garden rubbish full both of heavy lumps of dirt and of sharp thorny brush that would stab him when he least expected.

“The world is full of small ignorances,” said a quiet voice. Mrs. Ali appeared at his elbow and gave the young woman a stern look. “We must all do our best to ignore them and thereby keep them small, don’t you think?”

She looked at him and he read in her eyes a disappointment that he should have stooped to the dead-relative excuse. Yet he was as entitled as the next man to use it. People did it all the time; it was understood that there was a defined window of availability beginning a decent few days after a funeral and continuing for no more than a couple of months. Of course, some people took dreadful advantage and a year later were still hauling around their dead relatives on their backs, showing them off to explain late tax payments and missed dentist appointments: something he would never do.

“Are you busy with something?” said the Major. “You can always call another time, when your paperwork is finished.”
“No, no, it’s just a final deal book I have to read—make sure all the decimal points are in the right place this time,” said Roger. “I can read and chat at the same time.”
“How efficient,” said the Major. “Perhaps I should try a few chapters of War and Peace while we talk?”

“Civic unrest? This is war, Major,” said Alice, chuckling at him. “Man the barricades and break out the Molotov cocktails!” “You do what you must,” said the Major. “I shall write a stern letter to the planning officer.”

“I did say we’d be down to visit soon,” said Roger. “I told you at the cottage.”
“Alas, if I planned my weekends around the hope that you would carry through on a promise to visit, I would be a lonely old man sitting amid a growing tower of clean bed linen and uneaten cake,” said the Major.

“Oh, it’s simple pragmatism, Dad. It’s called the real world. If we refused to do business with the morally questionable, the deal volume would drop in half and the good guys like us would end up poor. Then where would we all be?”
“On a nice dry spit of land known as the moral high ground?” suggested the Major.

“As one who has been weak,” said Abdul Wahid in a quiet voice, “I can attest to you that it is not a path to happiness.”

“What I’m trying to say is that I think that is how everyone feels in the abstract. But then life hands you something concrete—something concrete like little George—and abstracts have to go out the window.”

“You are very strange,” he said. “Are you saying it is wrong, stupid, to try to live a life of faith?”
“No, I think it is admirable,” said the Major. “But I think a life of faith must start with remembering that humility is the first virtue before God.”
“I live as simply as I can,” said Abdul Wahid.
“I have admired that about you, and it has been refreshing to my own spirit to see a young man who is not consumed by material wants.” As he said this, the thought of Roger and his shiny ambition made a bitter taste in his mouth. “I am just asking you to consider, and only to consider, whether your ideas come from as humble a place as your daily routine.”

“But I must ask you, do you really understand what it means to be in love with an unsuitable woman?”
“My dear boy,” said the Major. “Is there really any other kind?”

He allowed himself to imagine striding into her shop at the end of the day, smelling of gunpowder and rain-misted leather, a magnificent rainbow-hued drake spilling from his game bag. It would be a primal offering of food from man to woman and a satisfyingly primitive declaration of intent. However, he mused, one could never be sure these days who would be offended by being handed a dead mallard bleeding from a breast full of tooth-breaking shot and sticky about the neck with dog saliva.

“These days, men expect their wives to be as dazzling as their mistresses.”
“That’s shocking,” said the Major. “How on earth will they tell them apart?”

“She’s a bad idea.”
“Chimpanzees writing poetry is a bad idea,” said the Major. “Receiving romantic advice from you is also a bad, if not horrendous, idea. Spending an hour dropping in on an old friend is a good idea and also none of your business.”

“If we stop for reality, I will never leave here,” she said. “It is too sensible to stay.

“I do try to avoid killing ladies, no matter how psychotic they may be.”

“I know something of shame,” said the Major. […]“How can we not all feel it? We are all small-minded people, creeping about the earth grubbing for our own advantage and making the very mistakes for which we want to humiliate our neighbors.” As he risked a peek over the sharp chalk edge, his stomach churned at the jagged teeth of rocks waiting below them and he almost lost his train of thought. “I think we wake up every day with high intentions and by dusk we have routinely fallen short. Sometimes I think God created the darkness just so he didn’t have to look at us all the time.”