Starke raving mad: KATHLEEN MACKENZIE, The Starke Sisters (1963), Charlotte (1964), & Kelford Dig (1966)

At first he did not ask her to dance, but at last, in a temporary lull in her attendant males he said, blushing beetroot colour:

"I say, I'm a hopelessly bad dancer, but I suppose you wouldn't dance with me?"

"I don't dance very well myself," said Charlotte honestly. She might have added, "Except in the gavotte, the lancers, and the old-fashioned waltz", for in such dances she and her sisters had received instruction.

I came across a mention of Kathleen Mackenzie's trio of books about the Starke sisters a couple of years ago, and a review comparing some of the dialogue to Ivy Compton-Burnett forced me to buy a copy of the first book. But it will not surprise you to learn that I've only recently managed to actually read the book, and then supplement it with its two sequels. These are, purportedly, children's books, but I can't help feeling that many young readers would have been a bit bewildered by some of the humor.

The three novels focus on Charlotte Starke, who is 16 when the first novel begins, and her two younger sisters, smart, rational Selina and clumsy but cheerful Georgiana (nicknamed "Duch" after the Duchess of Devonshire, the only other Georgiana they had heard of). The three girls, orphaned at a very early age, have been raised by their great-grandparents, the imperious Lady Starke and her husband Sir Cuthbert, and Lady Starke's particular quirk is that she believes that time and culture stopped (or at least should have stopped) prior to World War I, in her delightful Edwardian girlhood. She therefore insists upon the girls wearing clothing from that time, being smotheringly overprotected until they have been "brought out", having their dinner in the nursery each night. Naturally Lady Starke doesn't believe in modern education for girls either, so although they have had governesses here and there, they are appallingly ignorant of the world, though no less spirited and determined for that.

In all three books, the girls' adventures are really quite mundane—merely doing the sorts of things girls their age would want to do, even as simple as going to a dance or the cinema, obtaining a dress in a modern style, going to town unaccompanied by a chaperone, or getting a ride from a boy—but the joke is in their often extravagant efforts to avoid detection by their stern, joyless grandmother, or to manipulate her into allowing them what they want.

The jokes are also, sometimes hilariously (if perhaps implausibly), in the girls' complete ignorance of how normal children behave in the real world, so that when Caroline exasperatedly promises to kill Lady Starke if not given permission to go on a London excursion, Georgiana can quite calmly begin weighing the pros and cons of committing the murder (she ultimately decides it wouldn't pay off). It's in these exchanges that one can see the Ivy Compton-Burnett comparison, and if it's not the first comparison that would have leapt to my mind, let's say it's not out of the question that Mackenzie would have read ICB and identified with her themes.

In the second book, the girls manage to see their first movie, a Western, aided by Lady Starke's elderly maid who sometimes takes pity on them, and their reactions are displeasing to the other filmgoers:

"I can't think why they always gallop off in one direction, pull up and then tear off in another," she said. "That's what must tire those horses, because they make them gallop much further than they need. It looks as if they didn't know where they were going, but as they live there you'd think they must."

…

"I think she's loopy," exclaimed Georgiana. "There are all those trees and rocks she could ride through, and there she is dashing about in the open, and stopping every few minutes. I wish we could tell her to get on with it. She'll be caught for a cert. There she is stopping again. Go on, you idiot."

…

"If I couldn't shoot better than that," said Georgiana disgustedly and flatly, "I'd go and have lessons. Not that I'm not jolly glad they didn't get her, but it was piffling shooting."

And in Kelford Dig, there's an incisive discussion of small talk that, I must admit, echoes some thoughts I've had myself:

"I wonder why one always wishes people good morning and good evening," said Georgiana, as they came away. "It's rather stupid, really. I don't wish Grandmamma a good morning at all. It would be much more sensible to say bad morning, or dull morning, when you would be quite pleased if they did have that."

"I think it would be rather a bore. You would have to stop to think every time what you did wish people. And after all, if we wished Grandmamma a bad morning and she had it, every single other person in the house would probably have a bad one too."

The three books take place over the course of a few months, and their beginnings and endings seem rather random, one merely taking up where the previous has left off, though Charlotte does have a rather marvelous climax that unites (however temporarily) the girls and their formidable grandmother against a common enemy in circumstances that force the girls to admit a grudging respect for Lady Starke's complete unflappability.

I don't think these books are any kind of lost masterpieces, and by the third book, when Mackenzie relies on a young house guest from the U.S. and some minor intrigues around an archaeological dig on the Starke property to keep things moving, the joke does start to wear rather thin. There's a bit of "neither fish nor fowl" about them too, as they are perhaps too sophisticated for young readers and too focused on mundane adventures for most adult readers. But nevertheless I found them entertaining to pick up and put down in between other books, or for bedtime reading, and there are some very amusing bits here and there. I would recommend picking up any of the books if you happen across them, though not necessarily an all-out pursuit of them (galloping from bookstore to bookstore and tiring your horses, I mean).

But I'll leave you with Selina's reactions to Coral, their sophisticated, boy-crazy American visitor, and her concerns with popularity, which might almost be out of my own mouth:

"Everyone wants to be dated up as much as they can be, of course."

"Do they? Why?"

"Oh, don't be crazy. It shows you're a success. That you're popular, of course."

"Well, we never have been popular—except perhaps Charlotte a bit—so we don't know how nice it would be. But if it meant going out with people you don't like much I should have thought it would be better not to be."

…

"Do you mean you would rather be treated as a grand visitor even if it did mean being bored to death?" asked Selina. "If you do it is you that must be mad, I think. I don't mind what people think of me so long as I can go on doing the things I want to do."

Amen, Selena.

One might also think she was talking about Twitter… :-)