Some Tame Gazelle

Rating:
Summary: Not up to the usual Pym standard
Review: A first novel--and it shows. Has all the charm of Barbara Pym's best work (Excellent Women, No Fond Return of Love) but is marred by narrative clumsiness and (frankly) lousy technique: characters appear out of nowhere, conversations start one place and end in another, etc. Skip this and focus on her later, great work.

Rating:
Summary: One of Miss Pym's most enjoyable
Review: Although it was not her first novel to be published, this was one of Barbara Pym's earliest endeavors. I read in A Very Private Eye (a collection of Miss Pym's letters and journals) that she started writing it in her early 20's, basing the main characters on herself, her sister, the man she was in love with at Oxford, and other friends. However, she aged them all considerably, making them 50-ish years old. I think she may have worked on the book again later, so I don't think it's actually the work of a 22-year old. Miss Pym appears as Belinda Bede and her sister as Harriet. In the story, they are two spinsters living together in a small village. Interestingly, later in life Barbara Pym and her sister did live together. The character of their clergyman, a married Archdeacon, is based on a man sharing the same first name (Henry) whom Barbara Pym was devoted to in college. He subsequently broke her heart by marrying another woman. The fictional Henry, too, is married, but has been so for 25 years. Belinda/Barbara is still devoted to him, but with warm affection instead of burning passion. It's hard to explain the appeal of this book. It has humor; Barbara Pym saw the funny side of ordinary happenings and people. And it has pathos, which is a crucial ingredient of the best humor. There is even a touch of feminism, although gentle. For example, when Henry remarks to Belinda that women "enjoy" being martyrs, she repies that they may martyr themselve, but they leave the enjoyment of it to the men. Like Jane Austen, Barbara Pym limits herself to "a few families in a village," and like Jane Austen she succeeds in providing insight, irony, and, withal, enjoyment and optimism.

Rating:
Summary: Funny--But There's That Mean Streak
Review: Barbara Pym is a brilliant writer. I, of course, am not the only one who thinks so, or we might never have seen half of the work she eventually published. After writing and publishing 5 novels, with both critical and commercial success, Pym found her 6th novel rejected by her publisher, and by every other publisher she submitted it to. The 60s had arrived, and the sharply pointed humor of Barbara Pym was no longer in fashion. In spite of the rejections, Pym continued to write for 17 more years with what appeared to be no hope of sharing her writing. Luckily, as with most Pym stories, a bittersweet ending allowed the world to have another half dozen Pym novels in print to delight in. SOME TAME GAZELLE, the second novel she wrote (the first was very much juvenilia) and the first she published (following two separate rounds of editing during the next 12 years), is her funniest. Casting her eye to the future, she wrote about her Oxford friends, and about herself and her sister, Hilary, in middle age. Full of inside jokes, the novel's tongue-in-cheek tone sparkles throughout. Pym is a brilliant writer because her sentences are gems. She is funny because of WHAT she says and HOW she says it. And, finally, she is MEAN in the most pleasurable possible way. Pick up any novel by Pym and delight in her. You will be well rewarded.

Rating:
Summary: Funny--But There's That Mean Streak
Review: I have just reread SOME TAME GAZELLE and would like to write a comparison to Pym's other novels, for readers trying to decide between them. Of course, they are all marvelous, if you enjoy her kind of very gentle English social humor.

SOME TAME GAZELLE is, I think the most light-hearted and optimistic of Pym's books. The world it presents is very established and secure and the character of Harriet is one of her bubbliest and most life-affirming. The ridiculous foibles of all the characters are looked on with a very forgiving eye.

The down side of this book is its moral seems to be the more things stay the same, the better. Naturally, this doesn't make for a very exciting plot (none of her books are very plot-heavy, but this least of all) and there is a flatness to the ending. The humor is also less profound.

The relationship between the sisters is the strongest element in this book. The weakest is that it doesn't end up very far from where it started out. But that certainly is a delightful and amusing place.

Rating:
Summary: Barbara Pym's Sunniest Side
Review: I have just reread SOME TAME GAZELLE and would like to write a comparison to Pym's other novels, for readers trying to decide between them. Of course, they are all marvelous, if you enjoy her kind of very gentle English social humor.

SOME TAME GAZELLE is, I think the most light-hearted and optimistic of Pym's books. The world it presents is very established and secure and the character of Harriet is one of her bubbliest and most life-affirming. The ridiculous foibles of all the characters are looked on with a very forgiving eye.

The down side of this book is its moral seems to be the more things stay the same, the better. Naturally, this doesn't make for a very exciting plot (none of her books are very plot-heavy, but this least of all) and there is a flatness to the ending. The humor is also less profound.

The relationship between the sisters is the strongest element in this book. The weakest is that it doesn't end up very far from where it started out. But that certainly is a delightful and amusing place.

Rating:
Summary: Touching and funny
Review: In the early chapters of "Some Tame Gazelles" we are taken on a "Pym moments" romp through the day-to-day lives of the spinster sisters, Belinda and Harriet Bede. Timid, sentimental Belinda (one of Pym's "Excellent Women")elder of the two, a faithful church worker, has loved the peevish, married Archdeacon Henry Hoccleve ("dear Henry") for over 30 years. Belinda quotes 18th Century poets, wears "sensible" shoes and longs for "some sympathetic person to whom she could say that Dr. Johnson had been so right when he had said that all change is of itself an evil." Plump ("attractive in a fat Teutonic way"),jolly and style-conscious Harriet, in her middle fifties, has a fondness for young curates to whom she serves boiled chicken suppers and makes presents of hand-knitted socks and home-made jellies. We meet: The Reverend Edgar Donne, the latest in a long line of young curates fussed over by Harriet; Edith Liversidge ("a kind of decayed gentlewoman"), the disheveled, blunt-speaking neighbor with an interest in sanitation arrangements; the dreary, snobbish Connie Aspinall, who basks in the memory of her glory days when she was companion to Lady Grudge of Belgrave Square ("a kind of relation of one of Queen Alexandra's Ladies-in-Waiting"); Miss Prior, the touchy sewing woman, in a tender and humorous episode involving cauliflower cheese; the melancholy Count Ricardo Bianco, who on a regular basis offers proposals of marriage to Harriet. There is Archdeacon Hoccleve, the object of Belinda's devotion ("her passion had mellowed into a comfortable feeling more like the cosiness of a winter evening by the fire than the uncertain rapture of a spring morning"), whose standoffish behavior and proclivity for choosing unsuitable prayers and for preaching obscure literary sermons no one understands win him little favor among the people in his parish. And there are more matchless Pym characters set against a quintessential Pym story, touching and funny and quite wonderful.

Rating:
Summary: Touching and funny
Review: In the early chapters of "Some Tame Gazelles" we are taken on a "Pym moments" romp through the day-to-day lives of the spinster sisters, Belinda and Harriet Bede. Timid, sentimental Belinda (one of Pym's "Excellent Women")elder of the two, a faithful church worker, has loved the peevish, married Archdeacon Henry Hoccleve ("dear Henry") for over 30 years. Belinda quotes 18th Century poets, wears "sensible" shoes and longs for "some sympathetic person to whom she could say that Dr. Johnson had been so right when he had said that all change is of itself an evil." Plump ("attractive in a fat Teutonic way"),jolly and style-conscious Harriet, in her middle fifties, has a fondness for young curates to whom she serves boiled chicken suppers and makes presents of hand-knitted socks and home-made jellies. We meet: The Reverend Edgar Donne, the latest in a long line of young curates fussed over by Harriet; Edith Liversidge ("a kind of decayed gentlewoman"), the disheveled, blunt-speaking neighbor with an interest in sanitation arrangements; the dreary, snobbish Connie Aspinall, who basks in the memory of her glory days when she was companion to Lady Grudge of Belgrave Square ("a kind of relation of one of Queen Alexandra's Ladies-in-Waiting"); Miss Prior, the touchy sewing woman, in a tender and humorous episode involving cauliflower cheese; the melancholy Count Ricardo Bianco, who on a regular basis offers proposals of marriage to Harriet. There is Archdeacon Hoccleve, the object of Belinda's devotion ("her passion had mellowed into a comfortable feeling more like the cosiness of a winter evening by the fire than the uncertain rapture of a spring morning"), whose standoffish behavior and proclivity for choosing unsuitable prayers and for preaching obscure literary sermons no one understands win him little favor among the people in his parish. And there are more matchless Pym characters set against a quintessential Pym story, touching and funny and quite wonderful.

Rating:
Summary: Solid provincial light comedy
Review: Some Tame Gazelle is an early Barbara Pym
novel, but her many strengths are fully in evidence. She shows that she knows her way with provincial village life, which she portrays in neither a fond haze nor quite in the harsh light of reality, but in some alternative dimension, like our own, but somehow a bit more kind. The protagonists are two "Pym women", middle-aged, content, educated middlebrows, shrewd, amusing, humble and yet quite self-possessed. The central joke--"spinsters" doting on the local clergy--is soon lost in the subtle but larger point: these are two women who live life largely on their own terms, affectations and all. This is a good read, not at all an "early" novel. My only real criticism is that the plot seems to spin a bit in mid-novel, but it rights itself again by the end.

Rating:
Summary: How English
Review: The characters present at the opening of the book are the young curate, Belinda, and Harriet. Harriet's manner is blunt and jolly. Belinda and Harriet Bede are sisters. Neither has married.

Belinda loved the archdeacon when she was twenty. The archdeacon is miffed because Lady Clara Boulding attends the church of a rival, Edward Plowman. Lady Clara is the daughter of an earl and the widow of a member of parliament. The archdeacon tends to hate the garden party as an event.

Edith Livesidge, one of the local residents, is probably called splended because she is tough and wiry and is apt to dig vigorously in her garden. Agatha Hoccleve, wife of the archdeacon, has very good clothes. The servants call the archdeacon the Venerable Hoccleve. Lady Clara Boulding is to open the party officially. Opening parties is her chief recreation. Edward Plowman thinks the archdeacon enjoys showing off his knowledge.

Next the wife of the archdeacon goes off on vacation and the sisters, and probably everyone else in the village, take note of the leave-taking. Harriet has a tendancy to spoil all of the young curates. This becomes significant to the plot in two ways. First there is the marriage of the current office-holder. Then there is the visit of a former young curate who, amusingly, has managed to become both a bishop and a missionary to Africa.

During the absence of the archdeacon's wife, his friends, librarians, Mr. Mold and Dr. Parnell, pay a visit. Harriet and Belinda have a very successful dinner party for them and for others. Harriet receives a marraige proposal from Mr. Mold, which is declined. The bishop later proposes to Belinda, and that too is declined. Belinda explains that she is not in love with the suitor.

The star of the novel is Belinda. She is kind, dowdy, and self-conscious.