An Unsuitable Attachment (Isis Series)

Rating:
Summary: Romance, social class, church and a cat.
Review: Barbara Pym is often called the Jane Austen of our time. Insofar as she observes keenly the social intercourse, inconsistancies and mores of her own time and place, this is true. But do not regard her as a duplicate of anyone. Her dry, elegant observations reach their height in An Unsuitable Attachment, a meandering story which takes place in a London parish in the 1960's. Pym lightly delineates the social changes taking place in England through her assortment of characters. From the upper-middle-class vicar's wife Sophia, devoted to her aptly-named cat Faustina and her handsome if remote husband Mark, to the wistfully mod single Penelope, to the good-hearted if crude working-class Sister Dew, Pym represents the spectrum of generational and class attitudes, and the resultant clashes of understanding between these attitudes. In spare yet well-honed descriptions she evokes a post-war, newly prospering London, a city where exotic (meaning dark-skinned) immigrants live close by old-fashioned people whose relatives who come up by train from the country to open a parish bazaar. I lived in London not many years ofter this story is set, and the mix of characters, descriptions of streets and houses, and tone and pace brilliantly evoke the atmosphere of that wonderfully complex and vital city. The romance is fun, too.

Rating:
Summary: "Had she ever loved or been loved?"
Review: The novel, "An Unsuitable Attachment," by Barbara Pym is set in an unfashionable suburb of London and revolves around a small group of characters who live there. The Vicar of St Basil's, Mark Ainger, the remote and unworldly husband of the lonely Sophie, heads the community. While Mark plans his next sermon, Sophie hopes that an attachment will form between her sister, Penelope, and the new resident bachelor, anthropologist, Rupert Stonebird. There is however, a slight complication to Sophie's matchmaking plans--a very eligible and eminently suitable spinster--Iantha Broome also moves into the parish.

In this quietly contained novel, the story gently unfolds as the characters form both suitable and unsuitable attachments. Rupert Stonebird contemplates relationships with both Penelope--the "poor pre-Raphaelite Beatnik" and the graceful, ladylike Iantha. Iantha, however, rather unexpectedly becomes the object of desire of no less than three men. Rupert is quite an expert on mating rituals of obscure tribes, but when faced with the mating rituals of his own class, he is flummoxed.

Edwin Pettigrew, the local veterinarian is too devoted to his furry patients to form an attachment to anyone, and his sister Daisy is attached only to the cats who come under her care--although she does draw the line at "undoctored ... and Siamese cats." Several people in the St Basil's congregation find Sophie's attachment to her cat, Faustina very unseemly--especially since Sophie is married to the vicar, but it is a holiday in Rome that sorts out which attachments--both suitable and unsuitable--will become permanent.

I adore Barbara Pym novels, and I frequently re-read all of them for the soothing, reassuring qualities they seem to possess. If you like Jane Austen, then no doubt you will also enjoy the novels of Barbara Pym. "An Unsuitable Attachment" is a subtle, gentle novel of manners--elegant, smooth, full of faded gentility and quiet eloquence--displacedhuman--Amazon Reviewer