The Light Years

The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard published by Pan Macmillan, £7.99

This novel, the first of a quartet known as The Cazalet Books, was recommended to me by Glenda, a member of the Farley Reading Group – one of the many thriving local reading groups in the area. Glenda had so enjoyed this book that she had immediately gone on to read the rest of the series. When she told me that it was set just before and during WWII, I knew that it would provide good background material for our year of reading around the Second World War, and I promptly ordered The Light Years for myself.

I was delighted! Howard’s writing is gorgeous; beautifully observed, carefully crafted, and full of insight. Her subject matter is the Cazalet dynasty: ‘The Brig’ and ‘The Duchy’ are the parents and grand-parents of this ever-increasing family, and live at Home Place, a beautiful old manor house in gorgeous grounds, complete with stable-boy, gardeners, cooks, maids, nannies and so on. The Duchy is a firm believer in fresh air and regular baths – tepid or cold being her preferred temperature and she meets each morning with Mrs. Cripps to discuss the day’s menus for family and staff. There are four younger Cazalets; Hugh, Edward and Rupert, all of whom are married with several children, and unmarried Rachel who doesn’t know that she is in love with her best friend. Hugh and Edward live in London, Lansdowne Place and Lancaster Gate, but all spend their annual holidays at Home Place and the story begins with the onset of the long summer holiday, with wives and children settling in for the duration, husbands going back and forth at weekends.

The cast of characters is huge and my only slight criticism of the book is that there are so many people in it that I did have to keep referring to the character list, thoughtfully presented at the front of the book. However, we do gradually get to know them all well, and now that I have just finished book two ‘Marking Time’, I think I’ve got them all correctly assigned to the right families! We get to know many of the characters intimately, having access to their thoughts, hopes and fears.

Howard is particularly good at recreating the long hot days of summer and the sense of endless time that school- and governess-free days brings the children. Their capacity for mischief, adventure, friendship and rivalries is beautifully drawn; their small, but tremendously important, anxieties are tenderly and affectionately portrayed, also the difficult transitions from child to adult (this is an era without the in-between stage of teenager!)

Relationships between the husbands and wives, brothers and sisters-in-law are also carefully and sometimes wryly observed. Rupert has remarried following the death of his first wife in child-birth: Zoe is young, pretty and selfish, woefully inadequate as a new mother for his children and a misfit in the family until the Duchy takes her under her wing. Sybil has been married for a dozen years or more to Hugh, and their loving relationship is gently teased by Howard, based as it is on a complex modus of mutual self-sacrifice whereby each of them negates their own desires in order to please the other – usually with quite the opposite result. Villy, a glamorous dancer before her marriage to Edward, is quite unaware of his regular liaisons with other women, and in particular the fact that he has a mistress of many years.

Throughout this first book, the threat of war hangs in the air like an impending thunderstorm, and as readers we are well aware that their fears will all be realised, and that the comfortable, privileged world they have inhabited so thoughtlessly until now will soon be gone for ever.

Anna Dreda
Wenlock Books