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She was determined to escape the ordinariness of life, so she went to Paris, met some eccentric people, married some of them, and lived her life to the fullest. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall). Darling belongs in the pantheon of books that feel a bit like opening up a doll’s house to show the impeccable precision of the world within. This is a great listen otherwise, but I would wait until the sloppy editing has been fixed - there is no way anyone on the production side has listened to the finished product the whole way through.
This is the difficult question when considering a retelling of a book that feels as fresh and alive as Mitford’s 1945 classic.Laika, the youngest, retreats into a contactless digital life, designing the trading algorithms that will ultimately prove his downfall in a condo near Wall Street.
Like the modernised versions of Jane Austen’s canon before it, Darling has to stretch itself a bit to fit anything resembling contemporary reality, and in failing to do so in any meaningful way ends up becoming somewhat dream-like and fantastical in places. This is perhaps because Knight, free from the innate pressures of the roman à clef, has enough distance for clarity. Armed with a key and new knowledge about his parents' past, Nik sets out to unlock the secrets that his mother has been holding onto his whole life. Linda remains “soft-shelled as well as soft-hearted, with an overabundance of trusting optimism and friendliness”.
Es ist wunderbar amüsant, die Charaktere wurden auf überzeugende Weise in die Gegenwart transportiert! This is a book full of lovely things: clothes and curtains and old Apple Mac computers in “boiled-sweet pink”. But I will stop listing them now, as you really need to read them in their wonderfully written rant mode to fully appreciate them! But there’s no getting round it: being separated from your lover because they must open a new hotel in New Zealand is fundamentally less sexy than them leaving to fight the Nazis as a French resistance hero.
As well as Mitford, there is something of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s much-adored Cazalet Chronicles in here, plus elements of Eva Rice’s The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets and Barbara Trapido’s Brother of the More Famous Jack. I understand that using blank-space-Fran as narrator is a way of making the reader feel involved, but there should have been some serious conversations between the author and their editor at a fairly early stage about the wisdom of having much of the book narrated in great detail by someone who wasn't there and couldn't have known everything they describe, even if the characters who were there had told them. The book then follows all of the family – but primarily Linda on her pursuit of love, taking in London and Paris as well as Norfolk. I also heartily disliked the only India Knight book I have read because of the the smug middle class protagonists, almost all awful people. In fact, nobody in my book group really rated it - mostly, the reaction was: "Why bother writing it at all?Like most clever people, I’m not over-fussed about clothing; there have been numerous studies showing that successful types – unless they’re in entertainment, showbiz or fashion itself, obvs – tend to wear the same thing every day. But if you adore the source material, I think you are likely to find loads of pleasure in this loving homage. Only two bars of signal in an abandoned pig ark connect the home-schooled siblings and the narrator, cousin Franny (no longer Fanny, understandably), to the outside world. Darling, it must be said, is all the better for Matthew and Sadie’s delight in one another: it makes the characters make sense. However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald.
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