Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Pure enchantment, 8 Aug 2003
Once again, Amanda Craig has woven a spell over this reader! What a truly delightful novel - lighter than In a Dark Wood, but no less funny, wise and beautifully written. Concerning a group of friends and relations who go away for a fortnight to the Casa Luna, where their bored children create mischief, it explores the difference in love, work and generosity between English and American people. The characters are completely believeable, moving in and out of the serious and the comic, and the style is dazzling. A modern version of A Midsummer Night's Dream that never exaggerates its jokes or its sources, Love in Idleness is the ultimate novel to take on vacation. It will make you fall in love with it, just like the "little western flower" used by Oberon. Betty, the mother-in-law from hell, is a creation of genius.
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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wow!, 1 Aug 2003
It took me a little while to tumble to the way this is actually a modern version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, but I was hooked right from the start anyway. I love Craig's other books, but for me this is the best and funniest, combining the satirical edge and drama of A Vicious Circle with the magical insights into the world of childhood of In a Dark Wood. Eight adults and three children spend a fortnight on holiday together in a rented Tuscan house, owned by one Bill Shade,(you only spot who he is right at the end) and it all goes hideously and hilariously wrong. The hostess Polly spends all her holiday cooking and cleaning while her foul husband Theo lies in bed longing to return to work and being encouraged by his mother Betty (the moment you hear her face is permanently frozen by Botox you know who to hate.) Polly's best friends Hemani and Ellen both fancy Theo's younger brother Daniel but then there is Ivo Sponge (from A Vicious Circle) to stir things up, even before the three children make a love potion - with Viagra - to give to their annoying relations. There aren't any dirty bits, and you could give it to your granny, yet the climax is dripping with sexual passion.
It's beautifully-written, so that you can almost see, smell and hear the Tuscan countryside, and wise about people and love and literature so that you forgive Craig for choosing to write about spoilt, upper middle-class people. The hell of going on holiday with kids and friends is a universal one. Reading it was like going on holiday myself, and yet it's much deeper and more literary than the usual feel-good beach-read. The perfect choice for book-groups, Shakespeare-lovers, chick-lit readers and people who just want a great story. I'm going to read it all over again as soon as my bloke has finished it. I LOVE IT!!
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
first-rate comedy, worthy of PG Wodehouse, 24 Dec 2003
I bought this as a Christmas present for my partner, and thought I'd just read a chapter first. I then had to lock myself away to read the rest. I can't see how anyone could dislike such a charming novel (except those envious of Craig's prodigious talent). Yes, the characters are all middle-class Americans and Brits - but aren't they in most fiction? That doesn't make them smug, as someone has claimed - in fact, at several points I wanted to kick Polly, the self-sacrificing wife and mother, in the pants for being so depressed, or did until the real reasons for it were revealed.
As other reviewers have said, the novel is a version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, with the rude mechanicals left out (a pity - I was looking forward to some extra comedy there). Apart from switching the sex of all Shakespeare's characters (it is the women who pursue the men, for instance)its real touch of brilliance lies in making the three children, bored silly by holidaying in Tuscany, into the fairies. The clash between the children's world and the adults is beautifully described, but underneath it the novel asks questions about the imagination and its freedom to upset daily life, and about the choices people make when in love that are serious and worth asking. I didn't think British writers wrote novels as satisfying and intelligently witty as this any more.
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