Elizabeth Jane Howard

In 1937, the coming war is only a distant cloud on Britain's horizon. As the Cazalet households prepare for their summer pilgrimage to the family estate in Sussex, readers meet Edward, in love with but by no means faithful to his wife Villy; Hugh, wounded in the Great War; Rupert, who worships his lovely child-bride Zoe; and Rachel, the spinster sister.

The Light Years

Emmett

"Doesn't it feel very odd to you? Every day we seem to be creeping, slipping into this ghastly nightmare, but we all go on as though nothing much is happening?"

So ends an extensive novel filled with intricately crafted characters, a meandering and slow read, but forgivable when one considers its very nature. It is a humble, intricate chronicle of lives and times. To read it is to experience the everyday back then, and to know and recognise the presence of anguish and love and other human emotions that transcend ages, gender and class distinctions. It has to be slow in order to be deliberate and thorough and whole, and in this respect it brings to mind the victorian three volume novel seeking to contain life in the multitude of its pages. Structurally, it is uncommon for a modern novel.

The Cazalets are a large family of three generations and at least two extended branches (including Villy who married into the Cazalets, and her sister Jessica who is also married). Especially in the first part, the number of names and appearances made in succession can be daunting, but each individual is sufficiently distinguished by their unique traits that make it possible to root for them, or dislike them. I especially liked Rupert, the kind painter-turned-schoolmaster whose love for art finds no place in his role as family man and breadwinner, and Clary, his daughter who struggles with the loss of her mother, and the arrival of Rupert's considerably younger new wife Zoe, who is drawn waif-like towards excitement and is uncomfortable with being part of a family and a stepmother. Then there is Sid and Rachel, single women terribly in love with each other but shackled to their ever-demanding familial ties that leave them no time to spend together.

Howard's narration is a thing of love and beauty: elegant, simple but poetic, without being uninteresting (something, somewhere, is always happening). The author aims at a kind of self-effacement, allowing the characters to speak and act for themselves and in their gestures they stand revealed to the eye of the possibly discerning and relentless but always (consciously or otherwise) judging reader. Whether you like them or not depends wholly and simply on what they think and what they will do. Howard's prose is brilliantly neutral; she does not push as an authoritative or authoritarian narrator. Fair portraits are painted, but they are complex portraits of humanness that extend from an individual personality and their view of the world, outwards into the world they live in, capturing the temper of the times from the perspective of its inhabitants. Young Polly is intensely worried about the reality of war, but her concerns differ from Nora who, though being her contemporary, is shaped by her uncommon piety (she wants to be a nun) and sees devout prayer as an answer.

War (the second world war) is arguably the real shadow looming over this English family, who live in the modern world while trailing the sentiments of the Victorian epoch they have come from (emblematised by the Duchy and the Brig, the oldest Cazalets), and the horrors of the first world war (the injuries sustained by their sons). It is an indefinable force that threatens their accustomed ways of life, that even the very young feel its tremors despite their inadequate understanding of what it consists. (Jessica's son Christopher is determined to run away, motivated by his ethics as a 'conscious objector' and his resentment of family quarrels.) However, as a ominous sign it also strangely fails to be fully realised and its perspective emphasises ordinary perception. In The Light Years another war breaking out is a distant idea, possibly happening but not quite real. It is distanced by the mention of newspaper headlines, vague political radio broadcasts that crop up in daily conversation, adults and children commenting on Hitler and Mr Chamberlain, and expressed in manageable attempts to dig shelters in the Cazalets' land, and shuffling inhabitants to and from various properties. Seen from the ground-up, its advent has no immense solidity, no clear path, marred by media static and public distance from the political. It is always undecided, and its tensions almost disappear beneath the teeming detail encountered in daily life.

Seen from hindsight, however, readers know its eventuality, and having The Light Years end with a declaration (misinformed? premature?) that war has been averted is a peculiar but poignant moment. Tantalising, momentary, an imagining of things going otherwise but which cannot be in a realist novel, as in reality. These characters, locked in that brief slice of time, cannot know what is to come and hold on to their sighs of relief. With them, the reader is allowed to experience that untainted vista for one pure instance before, as it surely must, everything collapses around them.

The first book in the landmark Cazalet Chronicles, previously a BBC radio and TV series. With the onset of war, The Light Years reveals a privileged family facing uncertain times.

The Light Years (Cazalet Chronicles #1)

James Haliburton

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Ruth Muscat

Neta Steingart

Bianca Curreli

For two summers they gathered together, safe from the advancing storm clouds of war. In the heart of the Sussex countryside, these were still the sunlit days of childish games, lavish family meals, and picnics on the beach. Three generations of the Cazalet family.

The Light Years

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