‘This is a masterpiece of black comedy’ the retros you should be reading this month
GOOD BEHAVIOUR by Molly Keane (Virago £9.99, 294pp)
SHORTLISTED for the 1981 Booker Prize, this is a masterpiece of black comedy.
It opens with Aroon – the overweight, bitter, spinster daughter of the dysfunctional, aristocratic, Anglo Irish St Charles family – knowingly feeding her mother a dish that kills her.
The story then rewinds through Aroon’s upbringing in the 1920s, with her cruelly detached mother, her promiscuous, one-legged, war veteran father and her brother – whose secret gay lover she fantasises is in love with her.
Aroon’s inability to see the truth reflects her monstrous family’s obsession with ‘good behaviour’, never acknowledging any emotion or the damage they inflict upon one another.
Blisteringly brilliant.
POSSESSION by A.S. Byatt (Vintage £18.99, 620pp)
ROLAND MICHELL, suffocated by his marital and professional failures, devotes himself to researching married Victorian romantic poet Randolph Henry Ash, and discovers letters suggesting an illicit love affair between him and Christabel LaMotte, also a poet. This leads him to fellow academic Maud Bailey, and as they follow literary clues to unravel the secret relationship, they fall in love, mirroring their subjects’ affair.
It’s a hefty read both physically and intellectually, but Byatt’s merciless and witty skewering of academic pretensions and the vicious rivalry over ownership of source material is pin-sharp.
THIS SWEET SICKNESS by Patricia Highsmith (Virago £9.99, 318pp)
HIGHSMITH excels in portraying the twisted consequences of obsession, never more so than in this psychological thriller following handsome, talented David Kelsey who’s convinced that Annabelle, a former short lived girlfriend, is as in love with him as he is with her.
Nothing can dissuade him: not her engagement and marriage to another man, or even motherhood. David lives a double-life, staying in a boarding house while he plans a fantasy future and even buys a home for them, while his friend Effie, tortured by her unrequited love for him, slowly spins her own menacing web.
But when things get tragically out of control, David’s delusions are exposed in a devastating denouement.