Book Review: Circle of Friends
Mar. 25th, 2023 02:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI struggle to write about Maeve Binchy’s works, as one does when the only thing to say, really, is “these books are just so good.” I just finished Circle of Friends, and I stand in awe of Binchy’s gift not only for evoking character, but for building up a sense of community: not a physical sense of place (there’s not a lot about the rolling green hills of Ireland or what have you) but a feeling for the web of the relationships that surround and shape the characters, the social milieu that gives their lives shape.
I’m also so struck by her generosity toward her characters, which is all the more noticeable because some of them are so unpleasant (the sliminess of Sean Walsh!). But even the most unpleasant are never cardboard cutouts. You get a sense of them as real human beings - not so much a feeling of sympathy as, hmmm, fairness? She’s not asking you to like them - in fact often their three-dimensionality sometimes makes them less likable because their villainy feels so real - but you feel that she’s showing them as they are, perhaps in part because the leads get this same warts-and-all treatment.
Near the end of the book, one plotline really struck me: Nan discovers that she’s pregnant by Simon Westward, a local landowner fallen on hard times. He refuses to marry her (he has to marry for money because his grand old house is falling down), but gives her the money to go to England for an abortion - but Nan decides, instead, to seduce her friend Benny’s boyfriend Jack, tell him that the baby is his, and marry him.
In the bare recital this makes her sound like a romance novel villainess. In context it’s - well, nothing could make this a sympathetic course of action, really; but you understand it; the book has made you feel Nan’s desperate struggle to use her beauty and her smarts to save herself from a life like her mother’s (downtrodden wife of a drunken builder), and now the attempt to lift herself into the gentry has failed and she’s tired and she wants to stop fighting - and if she gets married she can, whereas if she gets an abortion (or gives the baby up for adoption) she’ll just have to start up the struggle again - and with less cards in her hand, now that she’s not a virgin.
And she chooses Jack not out of any vendetta against Benny but because he is the perfect combination of weak (he will cheat on Benny if temptation is thrown in his path) but honorable: Nan knows, as well as anyone can know in advance, that he’ll marry her if he thinks that the baby is his.
Jack is also an excellent example of character work, because you can see why Benny adores him: he’s handsome, charming, not merely popular but generally beloved, because he’s a genuinely nice person and so fun to be around. But there is that fatal weakness in him, and it’s also fascinating to see Benny slowly come around from blaming herself (if she had slept with Jack, of course he never would have looked at Nan!) to accepting that if she is with him, it will always be like this, because this is who he is… and even after Nan’s miscarriage puts a kibosh on her engagement to Jack, Benny doesn’t take him back.
I’m also so struck by her generosity toward her characters, which is all the more noticeable because some of them are so unpleasant (the sliminess of Sean Walsh!). But even the most unpleasant are never cardboard cutouts. You get a sense of them as real human beings - not so much a feeling of sympathy as, hmmm, fairness? She’s not asking you to like them - in fact often their three-dimensionality sometimes makes them less likable because their villainy feels so real - but you feel that she’s showing them as they are, perhaps in part because the leads get this same warts-and-all treatment.
Near the end of the book, one plotline really struck me: Nan discovers that she’s pregnant by Simon Westward, a local landowner fallen on hard times. He refuses to marry her (he has to marry for money because his grand old house is falling down), but gives her the money to go to England for an abortion - but Nan decides, instead, to seduce her friend Benny’s boyfriend Jack, tell him that the baby is his, and marry him.
In the bare recital this makes her sound like a romance novel villainess. In context it’s - well, nothing could make this a sympathetic course of action, really; but you understand it; the book has made you feel Nan’s desperate struggle to use her beauty and her smarts to save herself from a life like her mother’s (downtrodden wife of a drunken builder), and now the attempt to lift herself into the gentry has failed and she’s tired and she wants to stop fighting - and if she gets married she can, whereas if she gets an abortion (or gives the baby up for adoption) she’ll just have to start up the struggle again - and with less cards in her hand, now that she’s not a virgin.
And she chooses Jack not out of any vendetta against Benny but because he is the perfect combination of weak (he will cheat on Benny if temptation is thrown in his path) but honorable: Nan knows, as well as anyone can know in advance, that he’ll marry her if he thinks that the baby is his.
Jack is also an excellent example of character work, because you can see why Benny adores him: he’s handsome, charming, not merely popular but generally beloved, because he’s a genuinely nice person and so fun to be around. But there is that fatal weakness in him, and it’s also fascinating to see Benny slowly come around from blaming herself (if she had slept with Jack, of course he never would have looked at Nan!) to accepting that if she is with him, it will always be like this, because this is who he is… and even after Nan’s miscarriage puts a kibosh on her engagement to Jack, Benny doesn’t take him back.
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Date: 2023-03-28 10:27 pm (UTC)In the telenovelas we watch, miscarriages remove inconvenient pregnancies (after much angsting, etc.) with remarkable frequency.
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Date: 2023-03-28 10:58 pm (UTC)Upon reflection, this storyline might be worthy of a telenovela.
I think living with that decision might have worked out okay for Nan... if Jack never realized the baby wasn't his. But at some point he would surely realize the math didn't add up? Or his father the doctor would figure it out!
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Date: 2023-03-29 03:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-13 09:57 pm (UTC)/via Network
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Date: 2023-04-14 04:58 pm (UTC)And YES, also Benny's arc from this massive crush on Jack - she admires him so much that she can barely let herself imagine that he could be interested in her! - to realizing that she wouldn't really be happy with him, in the long run, and that's sad, but not as sad as it would be to spend the rest of her life working constantly to keep him.