Mr Golightly's Holiday

I fell in love with Salley Vickers when I read "Miss Garnet's Angel" ten or so years ago. It's set in Venice, a city I simply adore. It's a beautifully imagined moment in a solitary person's life, one where limitless possibilities open up inside her.

Then came "Instances of the Number 3", a very very odd book that captivated me despite my discomfort with the subject of a widow's growing fascination with her husband's transsexual mistress. These are books of courage and beauty.

Now this. I wasn't at all sure why, but I was drawn to Mr. Golightly as an exemplar of the kind of quiet, reserved, polite man of late middle age that I am. (Stop laughing.) Normally I give fiction about such men a wide berth because their lives are presented as so show more arid and meaningless...yet this is Salley Vickers, after all, and one can trust her to find an angle not instantly obvious, can't one?

Uhhh...I guess so...after all, Golightly's loss of his son is presented as the central event in his life, one that caused his entire world to rearrange and reorient itself. I know from losing my own son that this is the way many, if not most, of us respond to loss and grief for our dead children. But the writer in me was itchy. What was Vickers playing at? Where was the element of unexpectedness that her previous books delivered?

I'm glad I was patient. She delivered. It wasn't exactly what I was expecting, but it wasn't anything other than solidly conceived and executed fiction plotting. So much tidier than life.

I quibble with some of the authorial choices made, I sigh frustratedly over some infelicities of editing ("hoard" when "horde" is meant, oof), and I don't at all know what I really think about her central premise as tied together at the end...I think Golightly gets off rather too easily, but then again I'm a mean old cuss...but it's Salley Vickers, so you can take it from me that it's very much worth a read and will reward you for spending your time with its gentle, flawed, angry, hurt, practical, loving characters. It's like making a village-ful of friends in a few hours, and getting to leave before they get tedious.

Say...I think I just explained British cozy fiction! show less

Fable with an old-fashioned feel (like Mr Golightly), though set in the present. Effective evocation of village life and characters, though inevitably there is a higher than average proportion of "interesting" characters.

Some of the metaphors are trying too hard; it was described by one reviewer as like reading pot-pourri. Rather crass in places, eg the main character's name, the way it refers to The Catastrophe at regular intervals (as if to built up suspense, lest you hadn't noticed there were reasons for Mr Golightly's escape to the countryside) and the names and occupations of the couple at the end.

The final revelations seem quaintly conventional at first thought, but are actually quite controversial (eg his original book being a show more work of dramatic fiction, his disinterest in church and even prayer, and the implication that his son's death should not have happened). show less

The writing is beautiful, if you like poetic descriptions, and when I made myself read them, I appreciated them. But they don't add to the story.

The main character is having a holiday in a quiet village, only to find that it's far from peaceful. I thought he was a very likeable man, and one or two of his new friends were nicely drawn. But there are a lot of other villagers who seem two-dimensional and almost impossible to distinguish.

I thought the unexpected revelation was very clever, and neatly done, but I didn't really like the unpleasant parts of the story that came later. And the conclusion is oddly disturbing, too.

It's literary fiction, I suppose, and I'm glad I read it. But doubt if I'll read it again.

Longer review: show more target="_top">https://suesbookreviews.blogspot.com/2025/12/mr-golightlys-holiday-by-sally-vick... show less

There are two pages of review quotes at the beginning of my paperback copy of this book, and several on the back cover, and I can’t help feeling that each of the contributors has found something within that I missed. While readable, Mr. Golightly’s Holiday was nowhere near as strong, thoughtful, or beautifully written as Miss Garnet’s Angel, which had a deft, light touch to the sadness and vivid, un-stereotyped characters.

The premise of this one feels like a Reader’s Digest magazine story; a bit too kitsch to be taken seriously, despite the philosophy which, while elbowed-in in places, was at least thought provoking.

Mr Golightly is God. There’s no attempt at mystery in this matter; he is a white, good natured older gentleman show more (and Vickers could have thought a bit harder before validating that stereotype) who has come to the village of Great Calne, in Dartmoor, to attempt to write a ‘new bestseller’. Procrastination, village life, cryptic emails and writer’s block all conspire to keep him in a state ranging from benign frustration to deep sorrow over remembered loss, while becoming embroiled in a local matter of family history.

Some of it is clever, much of it is thoughtful, sadness is well-evoked, and the language is always readable, but most of the characters lack conviction and this really didn’t take off for me at all.

Recommendation: read Miss Garnet’s Angel and decide if you like Salley Vickers' style enough to read something less engaging before reading Mr. Golightly’s Holiday. show less

When this book was given to me I anticipated something along the lines of a modern Miss Read. I was definitely wrong. What I did find was a reminder of something long forgotten - one of the reasons, many years ago, why I abandoned my attempts at classical literature and returned to the comfort of children's books. One of the things I found most difficult to cope with in literature was what I called "author omnipotence" - the sense that the author not only knows more than his/her characters, but that s/he is morally and intellectually superior. The writing always seemed to carry a slightly ironic cynicism about the "human condition" which placed the author in a position above everything being written about. I seriously struggled with show more that. Children's books, by contrast, I found very different. In the Famous Five, for example (okay, yes, I know!), the characters were vital and important - they mattered. What they did mattered; it wasn't all depressingly predictable due to the limitations of human nature. To take a more modern example, David Almond fills his characters with an almost mystic urgency; a magical reality of possibility.

So I'm afraid Sally Vickers managed to set my teeth on edge from the beginning. Some of the characters did become more sympathetic and interesting over time, but it wasn't quite enough to compensate for the irritation. The passages toward the end are moving, but also, to me, a little melodramatic and unnecessary. And somehow I was not prepared for the startling conclusion. I didn't see it coming until Mr Golightly was packing to leave. In hindsight I find it fascinating to see a few of the levels at which the book is working, but even so, the premise somehow fails to work for me, which is a shame. One thing is certain - and also ironic - Mr Golightly appears to have a more refreshing view on his fellow characters than the narration! show less

What I liked about this book was the Englishness of it -- the characters and scenes that inhabit so many small towns. I've seen places like this when I lived in England, but that was (mumble-mumble) years ago, in another century, another world. You catch glimpses in Agatha Christie stories or even MC Beaton's books. That was the bit of the book which enchanted me. The actual story-line itself, and many of the characters, didn't grab me quite as much.

I do have to admit it took me a while to pick this book off the TBR pile because in my world "GoLYTELY" is a bowel cleanser.

I did enjoy some of the characters and plot elements, and Vickers's descriptions of nature are often really beautifully written. But God? Really? And the evasive talk about some elements he would rewrite now and so forth...really? This aspect of the novel didn't work for me at all.