Rom without the com…

Cluny Brown is extremely plain, except to the many men who think she’s beautiful. She does scandalous things like going for tea at the Ritz, so her uncle who doesn’t seem to like her much (and incidentally hasn’t spotted her beauty) sends her off to be trained as a parlour-maid at the Devonshire home of Lady Carmel. There, several men will fall in love with several women, there will be mild misunderstandings and mild jealousies, and then they will all sort themselves into perfect partnerships and live happily ever after. As will I, now that this one can be cheerfully despatched to the charity shop…

I realise this book is beloved by all and even sundry, but I fear its charm largely escaped me. Cluny manages to be both underdeveloped and unrealistic, which is quite a feat when you think about it. Perhaps Sharp genuinely had no idea about the working-class – she certainly gives me that impression – but an editor could surely have told her that by 1938 aggrieved uncles weren’t actually able to force reluctant twenty-year-old nieces into service against their will. Nor are all working-class people fundamentally stupid, although that’s how they’re portrayed in this book. Sharp reminds us of Cluny’s basic stupidity on a regular basis, unnecessarily since she never has a thought worth thinking or expresses an opinion worth expressing. Her eventual rebellious metamorphosis is ludicrous, since up to that point the most rebellious thing she had ever done was to eat oranges in bed. She seems perfectly willing to go off with any man who promises to let her keep a puppy – one felt she could have got a job, a flat and a puppy all on her own, and foregone the dubious pleasure of having to put up with any of these tedious men.

For tedious they are! There’s working class therefore stupid Uncle Arn, he who can’t cope with the idea that his niece might be attractive to men so gets rid of her so he can sit in the evenings staring happily at his wall – one imagines his mouth hanging open and his mind echoing emptily as he does so. Sir Henry Carmel, stereotypical Little Englander member of the declining gentry, is also stupid now I think about it – Sharp clearly felt stupid is a synonym for funny. We’ll have to agree to differ on that. Mr Wilson, the chemist, attracted to Cluny because she looks at him adoringly, rather like that puppy she so longs for, and apparently happy to marry a woman whom he considers to be his inferior, socially, culturally and intellectually, presumably because he wants submissive admiration rather than any kind of equal partnership in life. One is supposed to like him, I think. Belinski, the Polish writer who comes to stay at the house, has more comic potential and actually provides the glimmerings of a plot in the early stages, as it appears he has got into the bad books of the Nazis and may be in danger. But no, turns out it’s all been a misunderstanding, and really he’s just a mediocre writer and marginally more successful womaniser.

Andrew, the son of the house, is somewhat better as a character, being given a little more complexity and letting us see the gentry coming to terms with the approaching war. His mother, Lady Carmel, is also quite well drawn – outwardly she seems to be rather vague and wispy, but in fact she’s more perceptive than all the rest, and guides her useless menfolk with a good deal of charm. Beautiful Betty, love interest of many, is fun, and her development from immature social butterfly to poised society woman is much better done than poor Cluny’s unlikely coming-of-age story. I won’t mention the other servants, since quite frankly Wodehouse gives his domestics more depth and realism.

Nope, not for me. I’m not much of a fan of rom-coms in general, and even less so when the com bit gets missed out, leaving little except dull meanderings through an unrealistic depiction of pre-war life.

In Margery Sharp's novel of this name, twenty-year-old Cluny lives with her Uncle Arn in Paddington and assists him ably in his plumbing business by taking messages and doing the accounts. But she is of concern to her family - her uncle, his sister and his brother-in-law - because they think she doesn't "know her place": she's outgoing, adventurous, full of curiousity about the world, and this leads her to decide that she can take tea at the Ritz or be invited to parties. She's a complete innocent, and can't see any reason why these things are unacceptable - if other people can, why shouldn't she? It's decided, thanks mainly to Aunt Addie, that she must go into service as a maid in the country house of Sir Henry Carmel in Devon.

Even before she arrives Cluny's behaviour is most un-maid-ish - befriending the dog of a one of the Carmels' neighbours on the train, she is invited to go and walk it on her days off, and since the dog doesn't wish to be parted from her, she is given a lift to her new place of employment in the neighbour's Rolls-Royce. Cluny's first letter home to Uncle Arn begins: "There are twenty-seven rooms, Queeen Elizabeth slept in one of them but I have to share. The other girl is called Hilda. She had a baby last year but Mrs M. overlooked it. You tell that to Aunt Addie."

Esatblished at Friars Carmel she meets "the Professor", a writer who has fled Nazi Germany. Invited by their son for a stay of indefinite length, Belinski is warmly welcomed into the household by Andrew's parents - Lady Carmel explains her understanding of the situation to her husband: Mr Belinski is a Professor, who has been ill and now needs peace and quiet. Andrew, wrapped up in his own concerns, does nothing to disabuse his parents of this harmless notion, feeling that the explanation is well-suited to their kind and comfortable complacency.

Belinski recognises Cluny as a misfit like himself and understands her, perhaps, better than she understands herself. When she tells him she doesn't feel as if she belongs anywhere he replies with what she regards as a magic phrase, "For you, I imagine, the whole universe is to let." Her imagination thus fired, what she will do with this idea is one strand of this quietly funny book.

In contrast, the other strand is what will happen to Andrew. Concerned that there will be another war, he frets about his future, and while his parents hope that he will come home and settle down to run the estate, he pulls away from what he calls "Lord of the Manorishness". At the same time he is vying with his friend John for the attentions of the attractive and self-assured Betty Cream, who firmly rejects them both. Although Andrew's position of privilege makes it seem as though he has much greater autonomy than Cluny, he feels trapped by both past and present.

In 1946 Cluny Brown was transported to the US and made into a romantic comedy which loses all the subtlety and humour of this very English novel. Life at Friar's Carmel is so harmonious, peaceable and comfortable that Belinski has none of the irritations that allowed him to work successfully. Meanwhile Cluny, despite being "only" a parlourmaid, is able to escape the eye of the housekeeper often enough to form a sedate courtship with a widowed pharmacist in the nearby village. A "rom-com" demands effervescence and caricature, but what makes this book work are the tenderly-drawn characters with their little faults, foibles and escapisms. No great histrionics here, but gentle satire.

It's hard not to feel for poor Cluny Brown. The orphaned girl is raised by her maternal aunt and her uncle. When Aunt Flossie dies, it's Uncle Arn who takes charge of the young woman in the years just before World War II. Uncle Arn is a plumber, a successful one, in London but he does not believe that answering the phone for a plumber is the proper path in life for Clover "Cluny" Brown, his niece and ward. So he arranges for her to become a maid in the safety of the Devonshire countryside.

Cluny is not meant for the countryside, for service, or for someone else deciding just what she should do. She finds herself relishing her Wednesday afternoons off because she gets to play in the woods with the neighbor's golden retriever.

Sharp parallels Cluny's story with that of Andrew, the soon-to-be Lord of the Manor at Friars Carmel - the country house where Cluny is in service, who yearns to be anything but what his birthright says he should be. He wants to be part of the coming war, not married with children and looking after a farm.

Cluny and Andrew stumble along similar paths to marriage and lives that someone else wants to define. Andrew wants to rebel against his parents and marry a party-girl on the London scene but she turns out to be the perfect Lady of the Manor-in-waiting. Cluny charms a wealthy, successful pharmacist who proposes to her. And then she runs away to do what she wanted, at least what she wanted in that moment.

The novel is good. I was disappointed in the ending, because what I absolutely expected to happen never did. But it was a good ending just the same.

(I received a copy of Cluny Brown through NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest and original review. All thoughts are my own. My review is cross-posted at NetGalley, Goodreads, and Adventures With Words - my book review blog.)

Written in 1944, but set in 1938, this is a clever satire of the imploding British country house and gentry life, delivered in the form of a more realistic and class conscious P.G. Wodehouse plot--plumber's niece Cluny Brown, sent into service to learn her proper place, instead disrupts the quiet sealed bubble of Friars Caramel. At the house, Sir Harry and Lady Caramel are graciously hosting their son Andrew (who longs to join the RAF), Andrew's socialite friend and potential fiancee, and a refugee Polish author who may or may not be a wanted political dissident on the run from fascism. Throw in a staid neighbor, his daughter, and a rowdy Golden Retriever, the stodgy village chemist and his mother, and the thousand year pressure of the British class system as the servant pool unravels and the reality of war sets it. Sharp was prescient and clear eyed about all this--the future belongs to the Clunys who refuse to stay in their places, and who will build a post war Britain with their mechanical know-how and ambition.