Filmography

[the_lady_lily]

The Camomile Lawn

We watched this because G knew it as 'one of those programmes' that was on during his youth, but that he'd never really watched properly. It's a 1992 adaptation of a 1984 novel by Mary Wesley that cuts between a family's life in wartime and a funeral in the present. The family in question is headed (for want of a better word) by Richard and Helena Cuthbertson (a magnificent pairing of Felicity Kendal and Paul Eddington), who oversee a brood of Richard's nephews and nieces. The war impacts their lives as the young men sign up for military service and the young women find ways to keep themselves busy - Polly in the war office, Calypso by marrying for money, the young Sophie by trying to survive boarding school. In the present, the surviving members of the family are drawn together again at the funeral of the great violinist Max Erstweiler, who along with his wife Monica had joined the family circle as Jewish refugees from Hitler.

I am now, irritatingly, going to have to read the novel, because while the character development and all sorts of other things played out interestingly and compellingly for the first three episodes, in the final episode all sorts of things got rapidly compressed and insufficiently resolved. I wanted to know more about the intervening years between the war and the present, which sometimes got dealt with satisfactorily, and sometimes didn't. The characters were great - really interesting and compelling, and you wanted to know what was going to happen to them. The set-up was frightfully stagey and not particularly convincing, but the dramatic interplay between characters made up for that, I think. It also made up for the slightly unrealistic amount of sexual freedom that was waved about - this was pre-pill, and some segments of the series did feel as if they belonged more in a series about the Swinging Sixties.

It's not meant to be terribly serious, I think - it's more about the people than the historical context. And if you like that sort of thing and that sort of novel, then you'll probably enjoy this as well.

Comments

[helixaspersa.livejournal.com]

It's a very good novel, she writes extremely well though with a distinctive edgy style that's sloppy in places (for instance, the collapse of the intervening years is a feature of the novel itself). She was roughly the same age as her characters - only began writing in her 70s as I remember - so you may not have been convinced by the sexual freedom but I don't think it's made up! She herself had a difficult, sad and quite extreme life, however, which was no doubt not especially representative. If you enjoy it, the good news is that she wrote quite a few. There's also a very good YA novel by her which no-one ever seems to mention (called 'The Seventh Seal' I think).

[helixaspersa.livejournal.com]

Actually I just checked and it's 'The Sixth Seal'. Of her adult novels, I think my favourites are 'An Imaginative Experience', 'Harnessing Peacocks' and 'The Vacillations of Poppy Carew'.

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

Thanks for checking and for the recommendations - I have added them to the list, although goodness knows when I will get to them at the moment!