This is a novel which is as comforting to read as having a mug of hot tea and a chocolate digestive biscuit on a rainy day. In an age where so many novels are edgy, disquieting, challenging, clever, deliberately discomfiting, and which do a grand job paradigm shifting and creating alternative worlds and shaking the reader free from conventional ruts, it is nevertheless a simple pleasure to come to a novel which charms and comforts at a very basic level.
Circle of Friends does exactly what it says on the tin. It is about the friendship between 3 girls, and their growing circle of male friends. Benny is our chief protagonist, a large girl from a good background of loving parents, a secure and loving home, and who is both bright and of a particularly sweet disposition. She is depicted as an attractive woman with lovely chestnut hair – and a magnificent chest,
“Jesus, Mary, Joseph, I look like the prow of a ship” said Benny in alarm” (p231)
who is endlessly self-denigrating about her size,
“I’m so big and drab looking,” Benny had said suddenly. I’m like some kind of hearse. I caught sight of myself in the mirror”” (p63).
Although embarrassed always about her size, which she deems unfeminine, Benny nevertheless does not actually suffer from low self-esteem, thankfully, and has a sensible notion of her self worth. It helps that she is universally popular and loved by her community. She is also very self-aware and realistic, such as about the man she is madly in love with who is probably slightly out of her league as well as being unfaithful:
“No. I’m fooling myself that if I don’t eat, this fellow will like me more and stop going off with Welsh floozies” (p423).
Her parents hope she will pair off with the assistant of her father’s shop, Sean Walsh, whom her parents like for being a hard worker, but whom Benny finds rather creepy. It is hard to like Sean, depicted as self-righteous, smug, pompous, totally without humour, a climber, someone unable to appreciate Benny for herself, and sees her as a prize which is his due so he can marry into the business.
“The years had not improved him: he was still secretive and insincerely anxious to please.[…] He made an exaggerated bow. There was a sneer in his voice which he hadn’t intended them to notice” (p44).
Benny best friend is Eve, an orphan brought up by nuns in a convent, but not a hard luck story. Eve is much loved by the nuns, treated as a daughter and not a servant in the convent, and protected by Mother Francis, who truly loves her as a mother would. Her birth mother was an aristocrat who fell in love with a working man, and whose union was disapproved of by her family, which meant Eve was estranged from her relations. Eve and Benny manage to go to university at Dublin where their lives open up considerably, and where they meet the gorgeous, ever poised Nan, who, coming from a compromising home, is determined to change her life and do better than any lad in their student circle at university, setting her sights on an aristocrat – namely, Eve’s estranged cousin.
Benny and Eve are from Knockglen, a small town a bus ride away from Dublin. The story rolls on of university life in Dublin, of falling in love, of parties with young men, of dances and tragedies and of these 3 young women growing up, and staying friends. Their friendship is not blind in its loyalty, but it is warm and genuine and extremely generous. They are remarkably sensible, good hearted women, and it is such a pleasure to read a novel about young people who do not have angst and complexes and neuroses; who are truly nice people, normal, common-sensical, and natural. They are young people who understand the conventions of their society, and know both how to critique those conventions, and yet also to be appropriately respectful about them.
It is not just a novel about the three friends; it is also a novel with a lively full cast of the people who make up the community, their little foibles and kindnesses, their interactions and daily deeds. It is also wonderfully set in its place and period, of a small town Irish community at the end of the 20th century, still slightly provincial, still slightly formal and conventional and even prudish, but a place where everyone knows everyone else, and seems to have been there all their lives. It has a little Irish slang, but not a great deal. There are some lovely sentiments and phrases, such as when Heather tries to convince Eve to take a puppy:
“It was seven-eighths Labrador, she explained, all the best, but with a little of the silliness taken out” (p426).
It is a comforting book to read because for most part, even as things happen, one is always assured that there are limits to what can happen, and that nothing too terrible will occur, and there are good people around these young ladies to support them and for them to turn to. It is not the kind of book which will wring your heart; it gently engages you in pleasant chit chat.
This is my favourite Maeve Binchy, set entirely in the past. Some of her later books had a sameness to them, but this one was still fresh. And as you say, a lively cast of characters. I thought it was also a clearsighted description of the complete dominance of the Catholic church at the time.