Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
'Marriage is a totally mistaken idea' , 5 Jul 2008
The 'midget of a village woman, like a mosquito' who pants and grunts around setting up the after-wedding tea may make this comment in passing, but in this short novel it is only too apparent that the marriage between Dolly Thatcham and Owen Bigham is indeed a totally mistaken idea. Bearing a resemblance to Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, the book takes the reader through the day of the wedding, the before and after - notably missing out the wedding itself. We are sucked into a clamouring household - each individual bearing their own preoccupations with an edginess typical of a 'big day'. That alone made me want to run in any and every other direction. The bride's mother, Mrs Thatcham has a birdlike nervousness and a prattling stupidity that is in direct contrast to her daughter's languid gloom and inability to make her voice heard. It is only 119 pages but it is exhausting in it's heightened emotions and lack of peace. For there is another man, and the other man loves Dolly too - although neither have ever said it and both seem too stupified to say it now, or even consider it worth saying. Joseph runs to find her as a hammer in his head bangs out 'stop the wedding' over and over again, but when he does find Dolly (after a comedy of just missing her in each room in the house) she is preoccupied with covering up the ink she has spilled over her dress and says shortly 'you can tell me anything you like afterwards'. Julia Strachey's writing is stunning. Her characterisation is entirely unique, yet describes everything in a way that is so recognisable you wonder how you've never seen it that way before. Like the little boy, Jimmy's, face with features 'so small they could hardly be seen, bunched up together as they were in the middle of his face, like currants in a penny bun when they all run into the centre together for some reason'. Or, Old Mrs Whistable who 'resembled the blackish nobbled and twisted stump of an old elm tree very much more nearly than she did a human being'. An exquisite, frustrating, unresolved tale - just as is the messy business of life.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Only the weather is cheerful, 5 Dec 2008
This book is really short, but introduces lots of characters in its pages. I felt I only knew two characters well by the end - the mother of the bride, outrageous in her inability to empathise with anyone at all, and the 'other man'. The book is too brief to explain much, and I had to guess why the wedding was happening at all.
Having said that, it was an amusing read with undertones of great unhappiness and unfulfilment.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Short but Stunning, 28 Aug 2009
I loved every second! This short novel (120pp) all takes place on the wedding day of Dolly and Owen. And it's very, very funny. There is a semi-serious romance storyline through the centre of it (should Dolly be marrying Owen? Will they actually get married?) but it is the host of secondary characters which make this novel (or perhaps novella?) so amusing. My favourites are brothers Robert and Tom - the latter spends the entire novel trying to persuade the former to change his emerald-coloured socks: "Robert, your mother would desire you to go upstairs instantly to take off those bounder's socks, Robert, and to change into a respectable pair. Will you go, Robert?" He is distraught lest their schoolfellows - 'men from Rugby' - be at the wedding and witness this calamatous social faux pas. Robert's iterated response is "Go and put your head in a bag." I kept hoping these two would crop up, even though they essentially said the same thing every time they appeared, it was done so amusingly and accurately that I could have read pages of Tom's serious monotone and Robert's complete lack of care.
And then there's dotty Nellie-from-the-village, one of the 'help':
"The gentleman that come to see about the hot pipes out in the lobby, said to me, ' have two of my own,' he said, 'what are both of them big strapping great boys by now. And oh... good golly! - what devils and demons they do be!' he said. 'Well,' I said to him, 'my son Teddy is exactly the very same thing over again,' I said. 'All the time this cigarette-smoking, they pointed boots, and all of it, why, devils and demons isn't in it with such as they are,' I said. No. Very decidedly not!"
The whole family, and especially servants, are very funny characters - slightly ridiculous, but not too exaggerated as to not ring true. I suppose that's why the humour is so good - rooted in the actual. Sort of a less-hyperbolic PG Wodehouse, perhaps. Crossed with Virginia Woolf.
If you're wavering on Cheerful Weather For The Wedding, I encourage you to give it a go I think it's entered my Top Five Persephone Books, and since I've read all or part of over thirty, that's not bad at all.
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by Monica Dickens
by Marghanita Laski
by Dorothy Whipple
by Frances Hodgson Burnett
by D.E. Stevenson
