The Twelfth Hour

A lovely little story of the lives and loves of three siblings. Leverson has something of Oscar Wilde's wit, but fortunately lacks his incessant need to be epigrammatic.

114/2020. I read this because of the author's social connection with Oscar Wilde. The novel mostly consists of the tediously trivial conversations bored rich people use to fill their time until they die. Anyone who has better things to do doesn't need to read this. It's not an especially bad novel, but wholly vacuous.

Quotes

Quite: 'Think of the tedium of always bothering about perfect strangers — pretending to care about their luck and their love affairs, their fortunes and their failures, and all their silly little private affairs.'

Especially if they talk like this: ' "But this life is so short. — Do you think it's worth it? — (Do have some mayonnaise.) — I mean the kind of thing one does — waiting, waiting — at last asking, show more for instance, to call on your day — only meeting in throngs — perhaps not getting a chance, for months, to tell — "
"I suppose life is rather long, isn't it?" '

Award for Best Paragraph: 'All historians and teachers alike were regarded as natural enemies from Pinnock to Plato. On the same principle, Savile would never eat Reading biscuits, because he feared that some form of condensed study was being insidiously introduced into the system. Boys had to be on their guard against any treachery of that kind.' show less