This is one of Chevalier’s earlier novels – her third actually, after Girl with the Pearl Earring and Virgin Blue – and for some good reason I can no longer recall, I began to read it but didn’t get far into the book – and have since read most if not all of Chevalier’s subsequent novels, with great enjoyment – so it was a pleasure to ‘discover’ one I had ‘forgotten about’, so to speak, and to read Falling Angels.
Falling Angels begins in 1901, with the death of Queen Victoria and the end of an era. The Colemans meet the Waterhouses at the cemetery where the graves they are visiting are side by side, one with an urn and the other with an angel. Neither like each other’s tomb stones, and the wives dislike each other at once, but the families end up as immediate neighbours. The families each have a six year old daughter; Maude Coleman and Lavinia Waterhouse take to each other and are fast friends immediately, for all that they are like chalk and cheese in interests and temperaments. They also make friends with a little boy, Simon, who joins his father working as a grave digger in that cemetery.
The novel is told in short chapters by many voices – the 4 Colemans (including Richard Coleman’s interfering mother), 3 of the Waterhouses (though we do not hear from Ivy May, Lavinia’s younger sister), Dorothy Baker, the Colemans’ cook, Jenny Whitby, their maid, and even Simon, and John Jackson, the cemetery superintendent. This works rather better than it does in many other novels which have also attempted to employ this writing device because Chevalier is able to make each voice convincingly different enough (even if the men’s voices are a little stereotypical). The speaking voice of each character illustrates their personalities and concerns as well as giving the reader insight into who know what secrets, and how each differently interprets various episodes and happenings that mutually touch their lives. It is of course endlessly interesting to see how people who were all present at an event, or who live together closely, are not privy to the same information, and read and receive information very differently from each other.
It is a novel which teases out the differences in class in Victorian/Edwardian England – the Colemans are upper classed, and the Waterhouses more middle-classed, with Simon being virtually a waif, coming round regularly to get some food charity from the maid and cook at the Colemans’. Even his speech is rougher and less educated than the others:
“The sody bread smells good, baking in the oven. I want to wait for it but I know I was lucky to get anything at all from Mrs Baker. She ain’t so generous with the bread as our Jenny is.”
Simon uses slang words like “knocking” and “banged up”, which the likes of Maude is too innocent and well brought up to comprehend, and even misunderstands as physical assault.
The beautiful Kitty Coleman, in an unhappy marriage, keeps feeling that despite many blessings,
to have had an education and a liberal father, to have a husband who is handsome and well enough off we can have afford to have a cook and a live-in maid
p71
plus personal beauty and a wonderful daughter in Maud, nevertheless, her life is small,
he is unable to give me the larger world I long for
p71
She takes to the suffragette movement with zeal, and changes the course of more lives than her own, and not always positively. It is a time of change for gender roles as much as anything else in Edwardian England, and many are having to rethink social norms and their own expectations and behaviours. Through this particular community, Chevalier presents us with a snapshot of society at the point of this change, showing how not only men but women too, resisted the push for greater rights for women, and how the working classes may have resented it as privileges for the upper classes.
By the time King Edward dies at the end of the novel – which makes a nice balance to how the novel began with Queen Victoria’s death – the Colemans and Waterhouses and rest of the characters have undergone much change. The six year olds are now thirteen year olds, families have lost members and augmented themselves with new members too, change is everywhere. One charming part about the novel is that old loyalties and friendships however, do not change, and remain touchingly constant even over time, across classes, across genders. In all, it was a lovely read, a typically engaging Chevalier novel.
Recent Comments