The Pursuit of Love

Nancy Mitford is one of those names that I’ve heard of but never really known anything about.  To be honest, I had no idea what kind of books she wrote and so assumed they be quite a lot like Muriel Spark.  I really enjoy Spark and her tales of resourceful women who seem to be decades ahead of their time.  The Pursuit of Love is kind of like that, but instead of telling the story of working class women making their own way, it’s about incredibly wealthy daughters of lords trying to find love while they make their way through the world. 

It’s mostly the story of Linda Radlett, as told by her cousin Fanny.  Linda is obsessed from a very young age by the idea of love.  She doesn’t care about whom it is she ends up loving and so marries the first man she meets, and then leaves him for the next slightly charismatic man she meets before flitting off again to a wealthy French duke.  The book manages to balance the marvellously whimsical and completely dark.  Linda is kind of a moron.  Although she’s in Paris prior to World War Two she has no concept of what’s about to happen and finds the politics of the whole thing completely dull.  This is her saving grace, really, as a character because she’s also a bit of a bitch. 

It’s a gloriously witty book.  The early parts remind me a bit of things like Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging; the wit and the charm and the ingenuity of girls who want to find out about sex and boys.  Their observations on growing up are wickedly cynical, “I think Linda realised there and then what it took me years to learn, that the behaviour of civilised men really has nothing to do with nature, that all is artificially and art more or less perfected.”  It’s fun to see the girls develop into into women, even if Linda never really grows up.  She remains obsessed by the idea of “Hons”- the right kind of people, and “counter-Hons” well into adulthood, even going so far as to pronounce her abandoned daughter a “counter-Hon.”  Linda is free-wheeling and self-obsessed.  She’d be a nightmare to know, but it makes for terrific reading.

In contrast to this, The Pursuit of Love also manages to be romantic.  It mocks romantic tropes, but buys into them too.  When Linda and her French duke first meet Linda’s past marriages are described as like people she mistook for friends in the street, only to find out that they were strangers.  The pair do ignore the impending war partially because it doesn’t interest them, but also because they recognise that it will lead to their separation which they need to pretend isn’t on the horizon.  It’s a lovely little tale about being redeemed by love without straying into saccharine sentimentality.

The Pursuit of Love has been a total balm to my disillusionment with reading that’s been going on for the last couple of books.  I’m so glad I read it.  Added to that it kicks off with remembrances of Christmases past with a house full of family.  It really started to get me in the mood for the coming festivities.

I’m now moving on to another Margaret Atwood Tale; The Robber Bride.