The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate: Two Novels (edition 2001)

Here's another book that I'd checked off here as "Read," but when I saw it listed in "The Guardian's 1000 Novels...." I said I hadn't read it. I have a clear memory of reading at least one Nancy Mitford novel in my youth, and I'll need to take a look at this one to make sure it was the one. ( )

In Pursuit of Love:
This was an interesting story. It followed the love affairs of one woman. I feel like she seemed to change herself depending on who she was involved with at the time. It was sad. She had these great loves, but didn’t really understand who she was. I did enjoy the humor and the randomness of the family. They were a fun bunch of characters.

Love in a Cold Climate:
After reading the second book, I really started to like Fanny’s narration. She has a unique view of things and is very entertaining to read. I enjoyed going back and getting to see some of the same characters from The Pursuit of Love again. The Radlett’s are such an unconventional family, that it was fun to read another story that they were in. This story followed another eccentric, gentry family and a scandalous love affair. It was a light-hearted and fun book. ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed Nancy Mitford's "The Pursuit of Love." While the story itself -- focusing on the narrator's cousin Linda and her trials as she searches for love -- was fairly standard, I really liked Mitford's little details about the family (apparently modeled after her own.) From children's hunts to curses written on pieces of paper in drawers, she turned a kind of plain story into a fascinating one because of the comedic details about the family. The follow-up "Love in a Cold Climate" wasn't as strong for me I felt like the little idosyncratic details were lacking so the characters themselves were less interesting. (The best details were again about the Radlett family, who were just minor characters in this story.) ( )

Fate - and a bookswapping website - recently reminded me that I had yet to read Nancy Mitford's novels, despite working my way through her sisters' non-fiction titles, so I promptly traded one of my own books that I was unlikely to read again ... for another. I love Nancy Mitford's style and humour - that uniquely upper class combination of Jane Austen and P.G. Wodehouse - but found the actual stories, once past the familiar Mitford biographical details, dated and unbelievable. And not in a good way.

The Pursuit of Love is about the Radlett family, and in particular the beautiful Linda, modelled in part on Nancy herself and sister Diana (so claims Jessica Mitford in the foreword). The eccentric Radletts - wonderfully gruff Uncle Matthew, vague Aunt Sadie, and the children Louisa, Linda, Matt, Bob, Jassy, Vict, etc. - are described with indulgent amusement by narrator Fanny, their very sensible and ordinary cousin. The prewar years at the Radletts' country estate of Alconleigh are the funniest chapters, with the Hons meeting in the airing cupboard, and Uncle Matthew's 'child hunt' through the countryside. Uncle Matthew is one of my favourite characters, ever, with his 'damn sewers' and 'chubb fuddling'. He is a bad-tempered, unsociable, forthright old curmudgeon, but vastly entertaining all the same. I love his 'curse' on the people he hates:

'It was a favourite superstition of Uncle Matthew's that if you wrote somebody's name on a piece of paper and put it in a drawer, that person would die within a year.'

Linda, however, who soon takes over the story with her varied and always unsuitable love life, is a beautiful yet selfish and infuriating creature, the kind of woman who must always have a man in her life. She reels from bed to bed, marrying a boring banker, eloping with a communist, and shacking up with a French lothario who picks her up in the train station. I didn't find her eccentric or endearing, merely a cold-hearted cliche. Fanny the less than impartial narrator obviously loves her, but I found I couldn't care less.

And Polly Hampton, in Love in a Cold Climate, is Linda with a different name, who this time marries a disgusting old man to escape her overbearing mother. Boy Dougdale, played by Anthony Andrews in the screen adaptation of the novel, would never be allowed in modern fiction, being a Humbert Humbert type who grooms his own nieces. Then when Polly is cut out of her father's will, a distant relation from Canada, who makes Boy pale in comparison, arrives to claim her inheritance. Cedric Hampton is a raging homosexual, who arrives wearing a bright blue suit and blue goggles, charms Polly's poor father with his knowledge of antiques, flatters her vain mother, and generally takes over the whole story. I couldn't stand him either.

Nancy Mitford has a witty way with words, and a sharply observant eye for social and background details, but if her novels are exaggeratedly autobiographical throughout, like the anecdotes in the first chapters of Pursuit that I recognised from Jessica and Debo's books, then the inspiration behind Linda/Polly is slightly disturbing. Thankfully, Nancy must have thought the same, because both characters meet with a suitably fitting end. ( )

One of my favorite lines, when something doesn't interest me or I don't want to get involved is "It's not madly me." I only realized recently that this came straight out of The Pursuit of Love. (Uncle Davey says it a lot.) Really richly funny and fascinating and (mildly) decadent. On the same principle that no movie with James Mason in it can ever be completely bad, no Nancy Mitford novel is ever not worth reading. ( )