Anyone for Pym's?

 

     It has been many years since I read any Barbara Pym, but No Fond Return of Love was a delightful re-discovery. You wouldn't choose this book for its plot, but for its observation, its gentle humour, its careful, pensive mood. It is of its time in that published in 1961 when the author, then in her late 40s, was 'middle-aged', it has its central character Dulcie (not 'old' at all herself) looking forward to a cup of Ovaltine as the highlight of her evening.
     That's the thing about Pym's people, there is an air of slight sadness to them as if their lives, when finally assembled, had been found to have a crucial part missing, and the gradual fading of hope into disappointment pervades. But for all the gas-rings in sparsely furnished rooms, the relegation of the unmarried woman "to the shelf and good works", there is such humour in the book, and such interest as a portrait of a period and a type, that it is a great pleasure to read.
    There were good lines, too, from the opening: "There are various ways of mending a broken heart, but perhaps going to a learned conference is one of the more unusual", to a discussion of the curious habits of the locum vicar - "that seems to point to some dreadful kind of frustration - eating cold brussels sprouts in the middle of the night and tampering with the heating", and then there's the almost Fawlty Towers-like West Country hotel with its moulting (stuffed) eagle which 'attacks' the lady cleaning it with the Hoover attachment, and where the proprietress boils the coffee and the table cloths are made of plastic.
      "Who will run to greet him and be gathered to his heart?" wonders Dulcie of the alluring Dr, Aylwin Forbes, subject of so much of the book's spinsterly manoeuvrings. The reader must wait until the final page to find out.