Cornflower’s book group read Georgette Heyer’s A Civil Contract recently. I read it too, but rather late, and felt a brief post of my own would be more sensible than a comment on hers, three weeks or more after the deadline. Normally, I wouldn’t have read a book of this sort, but my mother was an enthusiast and I consumed many of the Heyer Regency novels in my early adolescence, enjoying the drama, the period detail, and the emotional chiaroscuro. Later, I read some of her murder mysteries, which are workmanlike though a little affected and very mannered, not up to the standard of the Golden Age – Sayers, Allingham, Tey at her best, or even Marsh.
So I read this (for the first time, I suppose, as I did not remember it) with the expectation of not really enjoying it, but with some curiosity as to my taste in books at 12 or 13. Well, it’s a very adolescent sort of book, convincing only at a superficial level, but with an easy charm and a fast moving plot which carries the hapless reader along. I found it an incredible story, though, even for those dark ages, and found the wealth of apparently authentic detail stultifying not convincing. But it doesn’t pretend to be a serious piece of fiction, so its cappuccino approach to love and history is entirely appropriate.
What I did feel odd was the language. It does, certainly, have the feel of the Regency period, and is very convincing – the news of Waterloo arrives in this book which places it very definitely in 1814-15 – but is the language really realistic? First, how would I know? Am I just being taken in by charming but completely over the top pastiche, rather as if future generations were convinced that we all spoke like characters from EastEnders, only more so? Two things convinced me that this was likely. First, her detective stories (see, for example, Duplicate Death) produced an extremely mannered and indeed impossible language for the inter-war years, including a Scottish detective who talks Gaelic in a way which reminds you irresistibly of Inspector Closeau: perhaps she suffered the same fault in her Regency writing, but we are less attuned? The second point is even more convincing for me – this is exactly the period of Jane Austen, who wrote of her own time, but she has none of this absurdity and extremity of language or behaviour – not even in the Bath passages of her novels – when the Quality were most in evidence – or Northanger Abbey, a clear parody and mockery of current tastes and mores. No, I think Heyer has been seduced by – and seduced us with – a caricature of the slang of a tiny modish group which she has drawn as a template for a whole society.
I found it great fun!
It's the only Heyer I've read so I can't comment with any authority, but those who are very familiar with her work maintain it's a novel for older, settled, married people (whereas other GH books appeal more to younger, flightier souls), and I can quite see what they mean.
It's likely pastiche, but I feasted on the detail and was taken up by the plot, however exaggerated the former and neatly convenient the latter may be. As to your 'cappucino approach', Lindsay, I know nothing of milky froth as I take my coffee strong and black, but yes, it's an escapist romp and none the worse for that!
Posted by: Cornflower | Sunday, 07 June 2009 at 07:41 PM