The Camomile Lawn [Kindle Edition]

What was living through the Second World War like? Mary Wesley takes us through the relationships and experiences of young people caught up in the 'great events' but here we get the personal, feeling aspects. Told with subtle humor and acceptance of the human condition. A fine and original master of the English language as practiced by an older woman writer who can look back on the whole of life and know what it all comes down to. This she does well as a kind of female philosopher of feeling, nothing like the thinking males tend to do. This will warm your heart and ask you gently, just how are you doing with your life?

The book opens on the very eve of the Second World War, with five cousins on holiday at the Cornish home of their Aunt Helena and Uncle Richard (all upper middle class). Four of them (two young women, two young men) are aged 19 or 20, the fifth is Sophy who is just ten. There are also the twin sons of the local rector, who has also taken in a Jewish refugee couple, Max and Monika, from Austria. The novel traces the lives principally of these eleven characters during the war, much of it set in London. Under the intensity of life in war-time, the young people lose any conventional inhibitions they might possibly have had under other circumstances. (I say `possibly', because uninhibited behaviour had been the mark of certain young socialites in the 1920s). One can hardly keep track of the sexual permutations and combinations between them. Even middle-aged Uncle Richard and Aunt Helena have unorthodox liaisons. It is all rather rackety, and in the first half of the novel one feels the characters are driven more by sensuality than by anything deeper, with emotions only superficially engaged. But in the end they do become more deeply involved emotionally; some psychological complexities then emerge (especially for Helena and Calypso) and the reader's sympathies slowly become engaged with them. Most of the story is told as a war-time narrative; but at the end of some chapters we move on forty years or so, when those who are then still alive are converging for Max's funeral and look back on those years; so we learn something about what has happened to them since.

Some of the characters come more alive than others in the book. Especially successful, I think, is the portrait of Uncle Richard, for the most part just avoiding caricature. Calypso, the eldest of the cousins, and Sophy, the youngest, have some personality, as do Max and Monika; some other characters are not rounded out at all. All of them talk in short laconic sentences (the greater part of the book consists of dialogue), and only Richard, Max and Monika have a way of speaking which is in any way distinctive.

There is humour in this book and pathos; it shows that the intensity of war-time life brought its pleasures as well as its sorrows. It is a good read, but I think it lacks the subtlety of a great novel.

This novel, which was made into a TV miniseries in the early 1990s, incorporates many themes and elements of plot which reappear in other Mary Wesley novels: unconventional relationships, heroines with names derived from ancient mythology, twins and cousins, motherhood, love arriving late in life, and the life-changing experience of living through the Second World War on the home front. It's a quick and easy read, involving but not too taxing, with plot developments which may occasionally strain credulity but characters who are fully-fleshed, unconventional and ready to seize whatever opportunities their lives bring.