Leo has been invited to spend summer break at a boarding school classmate's house, and goes even though he's not really close friends with the classmate in question (on first reference it's, "I can hardly remember his name now" -- Marcus Maudsley -- you're welcome). The Maudsleys are fairly well off and Leo spends a happy idyll kicking around the grounds, developing a bit of a crush on Marcus' older sister Marian who also dotes on him a little although everyone knows she's going to marry the local viscount, a gentleman who owns a lot of property so is tolerated despite his disfiguring war injury.
Leo's other new friend is a local farmer named Ted who is super-strong and has a haystack suitable for boys to slide down; he also promises to tell Leo about the facts of life (a conversation that goes badly, to say the least). Both the viscount and Ted use Leo to pass notes to Marian, which he gladly does without gandering at their contents. If you have a suspicion about what those notes contain, you are probably not a 13-year-old British boarding-school pupil (any more?)
Thus, Leo's introduction into the ways of the rich, the super-rich and the grown-ups.There's a lot of fascinating material in here about the ways that class is introduced to him, and deference, and how to act around different people; this all comes to a point during a village-manor cricket game that I could only have enjoyed more if I understood cricket better and knew which turn was a good one. For now, I'm going to focus on Leo's perception of the role he plays in the plot, and how unsatisfying I found that.
It's startling how naïve Leo actually is, but plausible that he could be so sheltered (widowed mother, company of boys from a young age) that he wouldn't realize to what he was a party. Here's what bothered me (and this is not a spoiler): Leo narrates this entire book in flashback as an old man, when he has come across his diary from that summer, although the amount that it truthfully reveals about its events is questionable. A likely story, but again, it's a device, there's nothing wrong with it -- until everything that comes after when Leo figures out what he's been doing as the go-between. The way he behaves in the end, I found shocking (and out of character), but he dismisses so quickly it's as if he still isn't taking responsibility for himself. Not that Leo or Hartley would phrase it as such, but this book exemplifies what I would call the "It is what it is" ending. I hate this phrase not only for its absolution but for the sort of cosmic shrug that says, "Eh, well, nobody cares about it any more."
But wait -- I cared about it now. If the ending of this book (which I am furiously writing around) is meant to deliver a moral lesson, then I for one am going against that moral lesson, even though I wouldn't condone what some of these people do. In the end it's Leo that I wanted to be punished.
Maybe it's because of his obsession with the zodiac that Leo is able to let himself off the hook so easily. Not only is Leo convinced that the zodiac moves all things around him, a bit of a bizarre obsession for a British schoolboy, his name Leo corresponds to the sign of the zodiac under which he was born, feeding his conviction that we all act as we are destined to do -- again, absolution of responsibility. This book relies more on the zodiac than a teenage girl reading the back pages of YM to find out what her crush is thinking. Maybe I wouldn't expect so much of a 13-year-old, but when it comes to the present-day, 70-something Leo, I wanted him to sit up and say "You know what, I did do [X, Y and Z for spoilers]" and either express contrition or take responsibility. That's what adults do.
No comments:
Post a Comment