Bad Relations

Cressida Connolly

(Viking, £14.99) T

HE novels of Cressida Connolly, daughter of the influential critic Cyril Connolly, are a wonderful discovery, a world of crumbling country houses, politics and social complications, nostalgic, perceptively portrayed and beautifully written without fanfare or irritating fancy punctuation.

Bad Relations—both uncomfortable family relationships and relations who are, literally, pretty bad—begins in the carnage of the Crimean War with William Gale cradling the dead body of his brother, Algernon, who was totally unsuited to soldiering.

At home, William’s loving wife, Alice, is desperate for his return, but she has kept herself busy with politics and new friends, innocent occupations that will backfire unfairly on her once her husband returns a changed man.

He is hailed as a war hero and awarded the new Victoria Cross, but, in private, he rails bitterly against constant mention of the Charge of the Light Brigade, contending that Tennyson has much to answer for: ‘Three thousand of ours lost their lives at Alma, and less than three hundred at Balaklava. Yet it is always the Charge which holds the attention.’

In 1977, Alice’s descendant Stephen arrives from Australia to spend a sultry summer with his distant teenage cousins, descendants of William’s, on their ramshackle Cornish farm, a section of the book that includes one of the best descriptions of a truly awful dinner party ever written.

Unfair treatment seems to run in the family and, this time, after a series of typically 1970s teenage mishaps, there will be tragic consequences. Come 2015, however, there will be a reckoning, involving a missing VC, and very satisfying this is.