Photograph: Focus/Kobal/Rex/ShutterstockĮntertainments gone awry are a common feature of house parties in fiction. Keira Knightley as Cecilia Tallis in the film of Atonement (2007). Set mostly in New York, Her First American includes a long middle section in which the members of Carter’s circle gather at a summer house in Connecticut – a transatlantic equivalent of the British house party. In this, my favourite novel by one of the US’s most enduring and underappreciated writers (still publishing at the age of 92!), Ilka Weissnix – a young Jewish refugee recently arrived in New York from Vienna – stumbles into a love affair with Carter Bayoux, a sixtysomething black intellectual, and, through him, is introduced into a world utterly unlike anything she has known before. Although rarely credited for it, Agatha Christie was a gifted comic writer, and this is perhaps her funniest book.Ħ. No list of house-party novels would be complete without a house-party murder mystery, nor can I think of any house-party mystery more fun to read this one, in which the featured amusement is a “Murder Hunt”. Dead Man’s Folly by Agatha Christie (1956) While Green’s interest in psychology is evidence of his debt to Woolf, The Decameron is in fact the work to which Party Going most strikingly alludes.ĥ. When a heavy fog brings train travel in England to a halt, a group of bright young things retreats to a suite of rooms in a London station hotel, where they proceed to throw a riotous and emotionally fraught party to pass the time until the trains can depart. This great novel from the 20th-century master of the gerund – his other books include Living, Loving, Doting, Concluding, and Nothing – takes place over the course of just 24 hours but took its author seven years to write. My favourite line concerns Margot’s teenage son, Peter, who serves the cocktails: “Downstairs Peter Beste-Chetwynde mixed himself another brandy and soda and turned a page in Havelock Ellis, which, next to The Wind in the Willows, was his favourite book.” I can’t think of a funnier house party than the one that Margot Beste-Chetwynde throws at her scarily modernist country house, King’s Thursday, and then decides not to attend. At once deft, rigorous, and deeply sad, Woolf’s great work exposes the private dramas of desire and compromise that underlie and sometimes undermine the rituals of public interaction.ģ. Just as Mrs Dalloway may be the most justly famous hostess in literature, so this may be the most justly famous novel to centre on a party. Vanessa Redgrave in the title role of Mrs Dalloway (1997). The threat of mortality lends an undercurrent of dread to the tales that comprise this remarkable work, in which storytelling itself is posited as an antidote to mortality. In the age of Covid-19, where better to start a list of house-party novels than with the book that defines the genre? Fleeing plague in Florence, 10 young aristocrats take refuge in a villa in Fiesole, where they pass the time by telling one another stories. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (1353) Whatever the case, I can think of no better time than the moment we’re living through, when parties of any kind are a wistful memory, to cast a backward glance at these 10 great books. (For those of you who have not, you have a treat in store.)
Henry Green’s Party Going, for instance, takes place in a hotel – a deviation from the rule that will, I trust, pass muster for those of you who have read this magnificent novel. Most take place in country houses – but not all.
Thus most of the novels I have chosen are British – but not all. In compiling this list, I have tried to do justice to the house-party tradition while expanding its parameters to allow for the inclusion of works that hew to its spirit if not its conventions. (Not in England, however, but in Connecticut.) Bring a bunch of characters together, put words in their mouths, and see what happens: this was the formula that I emulated when I wrote Shelter in Place, a novel much of which takes place in a country house where a group of friends have gathered, basically, to eat and talk.
#Murder mystery house party books how to
Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett: what these writers share is an instinct for how to move a narrative forward through dialogue. And though, as I grew older, I continued to relish the period details, the descriptions of clothes and furniture, the inevitable digressions about the inadequate heating, I found myself relishing even more the conversations.
0 kommentar(er)
