Haunting, bleak, accurate, very dated and brilliant ( )

When I began this novel, I thought it might be a sort of woman’s period piece, something akin to [b:The Enchanted April|3077|The Enchanted April|Elizabeth von Arnim|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1162239197l/3077._SY75_.jpg|387804]. It was far from that. Three friends share a summer holiday together, as they have often done before, but this is a unique summer for them, a summer of change. Elizabeth is a new mother, Frances is her former governess, seeking a way to embrace her almost sudden aging, and Camilla is Elizabeth’s best friend, who is afraid of becoming a spinster.

”We go on for years at a jog-trot,’ Frances said, ‘and then suddenly we are beset with doubts, the landscape darkens, we feel lost and alone, conscious all at once that we must grope our way forward for we cannot retrace our footsteps.”

The landscape does, indeed, darken and each of the main characters seems lost, alone and groping. All of their roles have changed and none of them seems comfortable in her own skin. And, there are men, who serve to complicate an already tense and emotional situation.

for once she thought without disgust of the great rumpled beds in Frances’ paintings which she had always looked at with fastidious, cold appraisal, but now longed for with the thought inherent in squeamish people that the sordid must always be truer to life than the agreeable.

Elizabeth Taylor robs these women of their innocence. They must wake up to the world, see truth, and know life for what it is and for what it can never be.
( )

Masterful novel, one of the best I've read in years. An unwavering stare at loneliness and life's impermanence told in the setting of an ostensibly cheery, annual summertime gathering of life long friends. The author also has an interesting commentary on the relationship of the artist to his/heraudience. Why is Elizabeth Taylor still so under appreciated??? ( )

There are some novels that you want to start read again as soon as you’ve finished it. To appreciate the finer details, unravel sub-text, and simply to admire. ‘A Wreath of Roses’ by Elizabeth Taylor had that effect on me.
It is described in reviews as ‘her darkest novel’. What fascinated me was the inter-play between the three key female characters, how they see each other, and themselves, how they behave individually and together. Multiple contradictions complicated by self-delusions and self-awareness. I don’t mean to seem cryptic. The story is simple, as is often the way with Taylor.
In that period after the Second World war when life begins to look normal, the undercurrents of the war experience are everywhere. Camilla and Liz are staying with Frances, Liz’s former governess, for their annual summer holiday. It is a habit forged by years with happy memories of podding peas and sharing stories. Except this year is different. Liz is now married and has brought her baby, Harry. Frances, an artist, is now painting dark tortured pictures rather than feminine florals and portraits. And Camilla has a shocking experience on her journey to stay with Frances; she witnesses a suicide at a train station that makes her melancholy, lonely and inadequate. She looks at herself in the dressing table mirror, ‘Her flesh was golden as an apricot; her hair, in contrast, looked tarnished and harshly bright.’
Taylor inserts three male characters as wedges into the cosiness of the three women. Camilla resents Arthur, Liz’s husband, for taking her friend away. Richard Elton, who with Camilla is there when the suicide happens, is staying at a pub in the village. Camilla feels sorry for him and at the same time attracted to him and will not listen to Liz’s instinctive uneasiness about him. Morland Beddoes is a collector of Frances’ work, he arrives in the village and stays at the same pub as Elton; he too feels uneasy about the man’s motivations. A friendly sort who finds himself the recipient of peoples’ woes, ‘Morland Beddoes was not in the last self-infatuated. He loved himself only as much as self-respect required, and the reason why he saw himself so clearly was that he looked not often, but suddenly, so catching himself unawares.’
This is a dark novel, but not in today’s meaning of psychological thriller. It is a study of ageing, friendship, the power of sexual tension, and it is sublimely written.
Read more of my book reviews at http://www.sandradanby.com/book-reviews-a-z/ ( )

“A fear of being left out inspired her, a feeling that life was enriching everyone but herself, that education had taken the place of experience and conversation the place of action.”

“in the centre of the earth, in the heart of life, in the core of even everyday things, is there not violence with flames wheeling, turmoil, pain, chaos?”

“Parting the leaves to look for treasure, love, adventure, she inadvertently disclosed evil and recoiled.”

Every summer school-teacher Camilla travels by train to stay for a month with her friend, Liz, at the flint cottage belonging to Frances Rutherford, Liz’s childhood governess. There had been hints that life was changing—that the pleasant routine was breaking up—the previous summer: Liz, then only recently married, was pregnant and plagued with morning sickness. This summer, even the journey to the village where Frances lives seems to bode ill. While waiting for a branch-line train, Camilla and a male passenger (Richard Elton) witness a man commit suicide by jumping from a footbridge. Although Elton’s clothing, movie-star good looks, and bearing suggest to Camilla that he is a man “whose existence could not touch hers . . . and counted its values in a different way”, after the suicide occurs, the two are drawn together. They get to talking when they’ve finally boarded the branch-line train.

It’s clear from the start that something is not quite right with Richard Elton. Even his name, Camilla muses, is the “sort of name that people don’t have . . . [that] a woman writer might choose for a nom-de-plume perhaps . . . or for the name of her hero”. Elton quickly assesses prim, buttoned-up Camilla, and he creates a persona that will appeal to her. He leads her to believe that he was a spy during the war, that he is working on a memoir about his wartime experiences, and that he is making a “sentimental journey” to the very town in which Camilla will stay with her friends. (The reader gets lots of hints, both subtle and not so subtle, that Elton doesn’t actually know the town at all, and that this is as good a place as any for a man on the run to stop.) Just when Elton is certain he’s got Camilla’s attention, he turns to reading a newspaper article about the grisly murder and dismemberment of a young woman. (His preoccupation with newspapers will only continue.) Elton will later leave the train in Abingford, just as Camilla does, and install himself in an upstairs room at the Griffin, a stale, dark pub.

Elizabeth Taylor shows a predilection for working with a small cast of characters. Her plots are quite minimal; the “action”, such as it is, is mostly psychological. The story of one character generally takes centre stage, but the narratives of the others are still well developed. In this novel, Camilla’s ill-advised involvement with the psychopathic Richard Elton is the major focus, but her friends’ stories and dilemmas are carefully depicted, too. They are of interest in their own right, but they also enhance and amplify aspects of Camilla’s experience. Take the elderly Frances: the former governess believes she wasted her life teaching foolish young girls when she ought to have dedicated herself to art. Frances is now finding a new way with her painting, shaking off the prettiness and sentimentality that characterized her earlier work in favour of something more raw and true. She is forthright and gruff with her young friends, heaping scorn on novel-reading and sharply correcting any of their tendencies to pretension and self-delusion. To Camilla, who likes to cultivate an image of herself as fine and sensitive, for example, Frances observes: “You try to enlarge yourself by everything that happens, even other people’s misfortunes. As if you had special feelings.” Frances’s old-maid status is a kind of caution to Camilla, an image of what she could become.

Liz’s personality and story provide a counterpoint to Camilla’s. Impulsive, emotional, and willing to engage with others, Liz has what Camilla lacks: spontaneity, a marriage, and a child. Even so, she, too, struggles with the realities of her situation.

Those characters in the novel who are aware that Camilla is associating with the disturbed Richard Elton, a man capable of causing real harm to a woman, attempt to warn her against him. Elton’s emptiness, falseness, and manipulation are actually evident to Camilla, but her discernment is always threatened by her consuming need to be loved and desired by him—by some man. Camilla’s psychological conflicts create most of the tension in this novel.

A Wreathe of Roses is a darkly compelling novel that explores a number of themes: loneliness, art, marriage, old age, friendship, the psychological impact of war, psychopathology, and the even larger question of the place of humans in the universe. The novel is mostly expertly realized. However, I think Frances is portrayed in an occasionally clunky manner. From time to time, she holds forth on philosophical matters in an inauthentic and even stagey way, appearing to be too much the author’s mouthpiece. Morland Beddoes, a middle-aged film director and great admirer of Frances’s paintings, is also a somewhat problematic character. He comes on the scene rather late, and I found his too-quick integration into the group and his rapid, almost preternatural assessment of Richard Elton’s capacity to do harm a bit hard to credit. (Beddoes is certainly one of Taylor’s “types”: the unmarried older man, a spectator and a listener, in whom women readily confide.) Having said all this, I still think A Wreath of Roses is a rich, dark gem of a novel, one well worth reading—or re-reading, as was the case for me. I found that I actually appreciated the novel much more the second time. ( )