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Enchanted Evening: The Autobiography of M. M. Kaye (Kaye, M. M. Autobiography of M.M. Kaye, V. 3.) |
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Reviews |
Description:
The third volume of M.M. Kaye's memoirs continues the story of her life in the engagingly chatty style that is familiar from The Sun in the Morning and Golden Afternoon. As this volume begins, Kaye is a young woman in her 20s, apprehensively en route to China in the spring of 1932. She would have preferred to remain in India, her childhood home (and the setting, many years later, for her bestselling novel The Far Pavilions), but her beloved father, who has been dismissed unfairly from the British colonial service, wants to retire in China. Kaye's account of the family's sojourn is colorful and often quite funny, but the mood darkens when they return to India for younger sister Bet's wedding and their father dies shortly thereafter. Kaye goes to England, planning to support herself as an illustrator, but stumbles instead into a career writing mysteries and children's books. The self-effacing author presents this turn of events as a simple stroke of luck, and devotes most of her text to amusing anecdotes and evocative descriptions of landscape, particularly after royalty payments enable her to return happily to India. In the privileged British Raj, politics hardly impinge until World War II begins in 1939, and this ill wind blows good toward our redoubtable heroine, who meets Mr. Right in the shape of an Indian Army officer who is escaping a bad marriage. Even here, Kaye is oh-so-English in her assertion that Lieutenant Godfrey John Hamilton was "only too ready to fall into the arms of almost any unattached woman.... I can only be profoundly and eternally grateful that she happened to be me." The warm humanism and ready wit that are displayed throughout these charming reminiscences will prompt most readers to feel that Lieutenant Hamilton was the lucky one. --Wendy Smith
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