COMING HOME

COMING HOME – Rosamunde Pilcher – 1996/St. Martin’s Paperbacks

Judith Dunbar is a thousand pages of DULL.  The book reminds me of THE PICKWICK PAPERS, in which some stodgy characters move through a panorama of experiences in an excursion in the English countryside.

Going through a bad patch myself, I stayed with this tale of constancy over about six weeks, because I needed constancy in my own life. 

It’s a coming of age story, very English, very stiff upper lip.  The characters, other than Judith are somewhat memorable, especially her best friend Loveday and Loveday’s mother, Diana, if you like to read about fabulous wealth on the Cornish coast prior to and during World War II.

Suffice it to say that Judith is presented to us as a fourteen-year-old girl, whose father worked for an English firm in Ceylon, where Judith had been raised.  She was shipped off to an English boarding school in Cornwall when her mother and sister were to join her father in his new location in Singapore.

By chance, Judith runs into Loveday Carey-Lewis at St. Ursula’s and the improbable duo become best buds.  Judith is brought to the family mansion and is treated like an adopted daughter. 

It’s a slow go until Judith is molested at a cinema by an aging pervert.  Still, the ever-constant teenager manages.  It helps that her prudish aunt dies in an automobile accident and Judith inherits a fortune.

There are plot details that are far too tedious to mention, but I most enjoyed this book’s description of Cornwall in the mid-30s and the descriptions of Ceylon during the war.  I am most interested in the waning days of the British Empire.

The book’s ending was predictable, but for some reason, I was sorry to have it end.  I might even tackle a sequel  if one existed.  I understand there is a film or television movie made in 1998 and starring Peter O’ Toole.  I’d actually like to see it.

THE CROWD

Classic Film:  THE CROWD – 1928

I found this gem by chance while scrolling through the cable channels at the 8:00 hour and landing on Turner Classic Movies.  I would consider this film a masterpiece. It puts us into a bustling New York City in the late 1920s.  Just before the Crash, we see throngs of busy, working New Yorkers in a growing, thriving environment.  The cinematography is brilliant, especially when we scale a skyscraper enter through a window, see hundreds of identical desks and narrow in on the protagonist.  He’s young, cocky and optimistic.  As a recent arrival to the city, he believes that he is very special, destined for greatness.  He was raised that way.  But he finds it’s not that easy and promotions elude him.  He chalks this up to bad luck and marries the first girl he dates, proposing to her on the subway on the ride back from Coney Island.  Earlier, at the start of the evening, he had pointed to a poor man dressed in costume and wearing a sandwich board.  He acts very superior.

Once married, they settle in a dilapidated railroad flat, one that features the elevated subway right outside their apartment.  The delirium of romantic love quickly fades and the bride’s family sizes him up as a loser.  He and his lady love are encountering difficulties and they are briefly buoyed by her pregnancy.  Hopes are dashed as his behavior becomes more and more erratic.  Still, he feels that he is destined to greatness and expects his ship to come in eventually.

Finally the man loses his job.  He has no prospects and eventually must take a job as a sandwich-board man.  He’s just a cog in the wheel, after all.