VAL HENNESSY
THREE MEN IN A BOAT by Jerome K. Jerome
(Legend €6.99) FROM beginning to end, this delightful 1899 classic offers non-stop, rollicking entertainment. Three inept young men endure a boating holiday from hell up the Thames from Kingston.
Interspersed with details of saturated bedding, swan attacks, aggressive lockkeepers and falling in the foetid river are our narrator’s hysterical attempts at poetic prose: ‘Spring is like a fair maid trembling on the brink of womanhood’ etc. He also lapses into hilarious anecdotes about Uncle Podger, hypochondria, camping horrors and bossy clergymen dragging him round chilly churches.
Plans to cook are abandoned, the hungry lads drop anchor at cosy riverside inns and, indeed, terminate the entire lark after two solid days of rain.
SWEET THAMES by Matthew Kneale
(Atlantic, €12.59) KNEALE certainly puts the gross into engrossing with his Gothic tale of murky intrigue, suspense and incest set in Victorian London. It’s 1889, summer of the ‘big stink’, millions of gallons of sewage pours into the Thames, Londoners’ only water supply. Enter engineer Joshua, determined to pinpoint the cholera source.
At home his beautiful bride refuses to consummate their marriage (not surprising, what with Joshua up to his elbows in sewage all day) and when she mysteriously vanishes, his desperate search leads him into the cholera-ridden slums and, by chance, to the epidemic’s source.
Makes you grateful to the drainage scheme pioneers . . .
THE LIGHT YEARS by Elizabeth Jane Howard
(Picador, €12.59) POP a cork and settle blissfully down with this utterly addictive family saga. Beginning in 1937, you enter the enviable world of a family whose boys attend public schools, girls have governesses, maids slave and cooks sweat behind the green baize door.
At Home Place, a rambling farmhouse in the Sussex countryside, the family converges annually for two months of summer jollity.
Yet, despite the idyll, each character wrestles with private agonies.
Adultery, heartache, child abuse, lesbianism, frigidity . . . all play out as lives intertwine and relationships alter.
A child unloved by her stepmother, a cheating husband, a dutiful spinster daughter...all unaware that their privileged lifestyle will vanish with the approaching war.