It’s no secret that
I’m a big fan of Persephone Books. I love the warmth of them, the feel-good
factor of many, and the insight into lost worlds and ways of lives in almost
all of them. The idea behind Persephone Books is charmingly simple: to
republish and celebrate forgotten classics, most of which were written by
women, and bring them to light and to a new audience. And the formula works so
well.
Which is why it makes
me sad on the very, very rare occasion when I come across a Persephone book
that I just don’t enjoy, and I’m sorry to say that Rosalind Murray’s 1926 novel The Happy Tree is one such book.
In a nutshell, The
Happy Tree follows our protagonist Helen, who grows up with her grandmother in
London but spends her holidays with her cousins Guy and Hugo, and their mother,
in the countryside. It’s an idyllic time, spent in and around the ‘Happy Tree’
of the book’s title. And although Helen evidently falls in love with the
enigmatic Hugo, she ends up marrying the boringly stolid Walter… which whom she
is left after her cousins go off to fight in the war, for which Walter is
declared unfit. In simplicity, The Happy Tree is a novel about how the war
swept up previously happy families, tore them apart and left misery and
desolation in its wake. But that’s a very stark description of this novel, and
one that doesn’t really do the delicate content justice.
Rosalind Murray’s
writing style was where I struggled with The Happy Tree, and I found it very
hard to become engaged in the book or to want to follow the narrative on. Her
sentences are often very staccato, and the prose is very factual with heavy
description of rooms and items, but seemingly little drive to the narrative.
Personally, I find this style of writing hard to engage with, but clearly the
team at Persephone disagree and found much in The Happy Tree to make them
choose to republish it.
I’d love to hear from
others who’ve also read the book and find out what you think. Maybe I’m alone
in my disappointment with The Happy Tree? I’d heartily recommend one of this
season’s other Persephone reprints instead: Because Of The Lockwoods by the
ever-reliable Dorothy Whipple, which is impossible to put down. Review here.
