This
interlibrary loan request was, like many of my requests, an impulse. Edward Candy (a pseudonym for Barbara Alison
Neville) was qualified as a doctor (one of a surprising number of women doctors
on my Overwhelming List—a sub-list may be coming at some point...), but left the
profession to raise her family. I first
came across her when Lisa Perry mentioned enjoying her three mystery novels,
but ultimately my fascination with novels about schools won out over my love
for good mysteries, and this summary of Parents'
Day from detecs.org sealed the
deal:
Parents' Day is all about the interaction of parents, staff and
teenagers during the annual parents' day at Cilrheddyn, a small coeducational
boarding school in Pembrokeshire. The characters are well delineated, but not
very much happens and no crime or detection is involved.
Not
exactly a rave review, but it proved enough for me.
The
novel features a dizzying array of characters and hops lightly from one set to
another. Owen and Helen Pinnegar—who
name all their children from Thomas Hardy novels, including Jude, Tess, Tamsin,
and Diggory—have just discovered that Owen is dying, but Owen determines to
attend the parents' day anyway, to play in a Mozart recital with Jude, who is a
narcissistic prodigy. Meg Lindsay is the
school's matron, whose promising career as a doctor was cut short by her
seduction and its resulting pregnancy (echoes of Neville's own experiences,
perhaps?), and she will today have to meet the brother of her seducer, who is
one of the parents. Then there's Vincent
Hardy and his second wife, Dinah, whose son/stepson Daniel has run away as the
novel opens. They bring along Vincent's
mother, a domestic dominatrix if there ever was one, who wallows in self-pity
and exhausts herself with her snarking.
And
there's more. There's Henry and Emma
Branksom and their slow-for-his-age son Robert, whom they are considering
sending to the school. There are interesting
relations between several of the students, including Tess's friends Nancy, who
has already resigned herself to being a spinster, and Kate, who is
comparatively shallow and an unmitigated flirt.
And I'm sure there are even more that I've forgotten.
Barbara Alison Nevil (aka Edward Candy) |
Quite
an array of characters for a 192 page novel!
It did occasionally get just a bit overwhelming, but overall the
characters were so interesting that I couldn't stop turning the pages. In its subject matter, Parent's Day occasionally evokes my favorite school novel, Mary
Bell's Summer's Day, which also mixes
the experiences of staff and parents with those of some of the students. But in its handling this novel is far closer
to Ivy Compton-Burnett's More Women than
Men, with a considerable helping hand from Iris Murdoch which shows up in
the characters' periodic questioning of the big issues, like life and death or good and evil. For example, this exchange between Meg and
Peter, one of the male students, could have been lifted directly from Dame Ivy:
"Was it Daniel who was in Tess Pinnegar's tent,
then?" Meg said, handing him a forgotten tray at the dining room door.
"I am glad it was Daniel, and not you."
"What did she mean by that?" Peter said with the
smirk of one who knows very well what is meant.
"I think she meant that we all trust Daniel," Celia
said. "We all know he is thoroughly sensible."
"What a thing to know about anybody!" Peter said.
"I am glad nobody even suspects that of me."
"You should not pretend to be worse than you are, Peter.
It is such a silly pose."
"I thought it would be less silly than pretending to be
better. At least, less ordinary."
Or, a
bit later, Diggory Pinnegar makes this similarly Compton-Burnett-esque
observation:
"Matthew says the Victorians thought all little children
were as good as angels," Diggory said, "and that was why they kept on
beating them, because they were always being disappointed."
If
you're not a Compton-Burnett fan, though, that doesn't necessarily mean whis
novel isn't for you. Candy/Neville is
not as unrelenting in the use of dialogue, nor is all of her dialogue as
stiffly philosophical and unrealistic as Dame Ivy was prone to write.
Cover of a later novel featuring an enthusiastic blurb about Parents' Day |
Parents' Day has shades of soap opera,
which is surely intentional and self-referential (and perhaps even a bit
postmodern) as Vincent and Dinah are screenwriters for a television soap opera
set in a school. They incessantly discuss
the scripted alter-ego of the real-world school they're visiting, and provide
some of the most interesting and amusing passages in the novel. Dinah comes across rather as a blithering idiot
who can barely distinguish reality from fiction, while Vincent is cynical and
calculating in the ways in which he tidies up reality to reach a larger
audience. Here they are just after
discovering that Daniel is avoiding them:
There were few things Dinah could not conceive of, and Daniel's
defection was not among them.
"Oh, Vincent, really, there is no need to look so
stunned! You know very well how unpredictable boys of Daniel's age can be.
There was Terry—remember what a time the school had with him, six or seven
episodes ago."
"But this is a real boy, my son, and a real school. This
is actually happening, Dinah, Daniel is hiding from us!"
"Yes, it is thrilling to see how right we were about
Terry; remember how horrified his parents were—they felt they had done
everything for him and then the boy simply cut himself off; we were absolutely
on the ball there, Vincent; their reaction was exactly what yours is now, ours,
I ought to say."
Dinah
sees everyone around her as grist for her screenwriting mill, and one can
easily see why Daniel would like to stay away from them as long as
possible. Particularly in view of
Dinah's explanation of why Daniel was send to Cilrheddyn in the first place:
"My husband's son, my stepson, is handsome too; that is
really one reason why we sent him to school down here. He is not so very much
younger than I am, and it would be too sad if anything like Phedre
developed."
"That was only one of the reasons," Vincent said
while Emma glanced at Harry in alarm, which her husband's ignorance of Racine
made quite superfluous. "Daniel is a bright boy who needed more individual
attention than he would get at an ordinary grammar school."
Oh,
dear. As we see no evidence that Daniel
takes any interest in Dinah whatsoever, it seems rather more likely that
Dinah—clearly much younger than Vincent—is imagining Daniel's potential
attraction to her for her own narcissistic pleasure and for how it might spice
up their lives and provide fuel for her writing.
I
found Parents' Day as entertaining and
compelling as a soap opera. If the
ending felt like a bit of an anticlimax, that's possibly just my failure as a
reader, but it doesn't change the fact that I couldn't put the book down for
two days. I don't think I could wholeheartedly
choose this novel as a reprint for my fantasy publishing house, Furrowed
Middlebrow Books, but if I were to kick things up a notch and begin Furrowed
Middlebrow Productions, then there's no question I would start development on Parents' Day the BBC mini-series without
delay. It seems like a perfect candidate
for dramatization.
Just one
final quote because I can't just leave that earlier reference to Iris Murdoch
hanging, and this is one of the most striking passages of the novel and one
which makes Daniel a particularly intriguing and likeable character. For those of you who are fans of Murdoch,
couldn't you see this as having been penned by the brilliant Dame Iris?:
Daniel awoke with a start: a mouse had run up his arm, its whiskers
brushed against his neck. For a moment he could not grasp what had happened,
and thought it was a spider or something else offensive and cold-blooded. He
dashed the back of his hand against his throat and the little animal was
knocked on to the pew beside him. He put out a hand to pick it up, but it
whisked out of his reach and down to the floor faster almost than his glance
could follow. He was glad his thoughtless movement had not injured it, and
somehow pleased that his sleeping self had seemed so little of a menace.
Oh Scott, I have an Edward Candy mystery sitting on my shelf waiting for me and I had no idea about the authors true identity! I will have to get to the book soon!
ReplyDeleteI'll look forward to seeing what you think of it, Peggy Ann!
DeleteI've read Words For Murder Perhaps, and Bones of Contention. Both quite good, if a bit dated.
ReplyDeleteThanks for mentioning the name to me, Lisa. I might not have come across Parents' Day if not for you!
DeleteHi,
ReplyDeleteEdward Candy was my Mum and I think the school in Parents Day was based on Wennington School in Yorkshire which all of us (5) children went to.
I always preferred her detective books.
That's fascinating, Sarah. Thanks for adding some personal insight to the book. If there's any other information or recollection you can share about your mother and her writing, feel free to email me (furrowed.middlebrow@gmail.com). Thanks for commenting!
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