Well, it’ll be a good wee while before Ivy Compton-Burnett darkens my door again. I don’t think I have actually read anything by her before this one but I did see her mentioned on another blog, I can’t remember which one though. I had just about forgotten about her so when I saw this book in the Oxfam bookshop in Perth I thought I’d give her a go.

The blurb on the back says:
‘An acting out of powerful impulses that run counter to an accepted morality – brutal truth-telling, repressed family hatreds and loves’ – Storm Jameson in the Spectator.

and
‘One of the most brilliant and original novelists in the English language’ – Daily Telegraph.

A God and his Gifts really didn’t appeal to me at all and it was only the fact that it was just 173 pages long and the hope that a certain ghastly character would come to a very sticky end which enabled me to get to the end of the book.

It was published in 1963 but the setting is Edwardian upper-class family life. Hereward Egerton is the young arrogant son of Sir Michael and his wife Joanna and when Hereward’s proposal of marriage to Rosa is rejected he takes himself off and marries Ada because he feels it’s time he had a wife. Unfortunately for all the other characters Hereward is incapable of keeping his hands off all of the young female members of his family, including his daughters-in-law.

He is able to get off with it because as a successful author of novels he is keeping the entire family afloat with his earnings. Apart from the tacky subject matter I also didn’t like Compton-Burnett’s writing style. Almost the entire book is dialogue, probably as much as 95% of it. It was more like reading a play than a novel, there’s hardly any description in it and I like to be able to imagine the settings, clothes and such so that was a big drawback for me too.

I kept hoping that Hereward would be struck by lightning as being run over by a double decker bus obviously wasn’t going to happen – but no such luck!