I read widely and compulsively and my fancies are ever changing. My love of reading, however, is no mere fancy.
The Optimist's Daughter meets The Wings of the Dove, set against the glaring light of the Med, The Bay of Angels made me feel horribly sad. One of the main characters spends half the book dying, too young, I might add. This was not the book that I wanted to read about Nice. I wanted a romance and some adventure and a name-dropped cafe or bar I could go to and have a drink at like Zoe Cunningham did in The Bay of Angels, but neither Zoe nor her author were helping me out there. The Wings of the Dove, though also very sad One of the main characters spends half the book dying, too young, I might add. and not what I wanted to read right before going to Venice, at the very least gave me Florian's on the Piazza San Marco.
I got to sit at the bar there and have a drink, just like Merton Denshler (and Henry James, and any other male writerly type who passed through Venice in the past 300 years).
This was one of the more expensive 'been there, had a drink like Person X' experiences I've had in my life, but I must recommend it: the waiters are all impeccably dressed and polite, the atmosphere is warm and inviting and cozy, the people watching is top notch, and they have the BEST bar snacks - and you get them all to yourself!
So, The Bay of Angels disappointed in regard to fresh ideas for activities in the South of France, and the only landmark of note is St. Rita's in the Vieux Ville.
A lot of funerals happen there. (It didn't help my mood today when, just after finishing a section of this novel where a funeral is held at St. Rita of Cascia in Nice, Handsome Boyfriend and I drove past the Shrine of St. Rita of Cascia in Philadelphia and a funeral procession was exiting the church. It was a very Stranger than Fiction moment.) Which is all to say, if you are planning a trip to the Riviera and want to read a few good novels set there to gear you up for the trip, maybe leave this one at the bottom of the pile.
However, I can't believe that I've never read Brookner before; the writing here is top notch, not a clink or clank or cliche to be found. She is the real deal and I have every intention of devouring the rest of her oeuvre. (Bay of Angels was her 22nd(!!?!) novel!) Bay of Angels is also a great, albeit small, novel. A young woman, Zoe Cunningham reads fairy tales as a child, and believes in them. She and her mother, who are 'independent' (i.e., don't have to work), live in a modest flat in London until Zoe, seventeen and supplanting The Blue Fairy Book with the Greek Myths of gods intervening in human life, and her mother meet Simon Gould, wealthy widower, who marries Mrs. Cunningham and whisks her off to his home in the South of France, buying Zoe her own flat in London and setting each of them up with a private expense account. Zoe's 'theory' - that fairy tales and/or deus ex machinae will come true as long as you believe - is proven correct. Then everything goes to hell.
In the great literary tradition of the city-as-character, Nice plays the role of fairy godmother or protector goddess in Zoe's fairy-tale gone wrong. It is a moving, multi-layered story about love and fate and family that asks and seeks to answer how much control we have over our lives. The twenty-year-old Zoe reminded me so much of myself at that age, too.
A.S. Byatt's Possession and The Children's Book cover much of the same ground (including the fairy tales) and are much better written than TFG, and don't require condiments, and if you haven't read either of those novels you should before you dive into this. You will be well rewarded for your effort.
The story is this: In modern times, Cassandra Andrews, Brisbane native, widow, sometime antiques dealer, is left a cottage in Cornwall (my favorite place I've never been to) by her grandmother. In the 1970s, Nell O'Connor uncovers a mystery at her father's funeral and flies to England to investigate, and in the 1890s, a young street urchin discovers her aristocratic roots and comes to wish she hadn't. It is all very mysterious and the details are given out all at the right time and there was a nice, if expected twist at the end, and all of these women come off authentically and you will root for them.
Life was missing, though. Each of the three main characters, Eliza, Nell, Cassandra, floated as if in a cloud. None were allowed intimate friendships or relationships, none of them allowed a career path or calling or vocation that they could follow with success. Each had lost, under tragic circumstances, their lovers and friends and any hope that they had of families and none were allowed to follow any other dreams. There is some mention, at one point, of a family curse, but it seems an add-on to make a good story - it is never followed up on. The thought of an entire family of women without any vocation or friendships, whose lovers and closest friends are doomed to be taken from them in tragic and awful ways was depressing, unexplained and unbelievable.
All of the men in the book get killed off in one way or another, or are just monstrous half-humans, but, I thought early on, this could just be an entrance point to introducing some lady-loving-lady relationships.But no. This novel is completely sexless also, and what's worse, seems to suffer from complete pleasure anxiety. No one enjoys intimacy, and should they, be in physical or emotional, it spells the doom of their relationship. Child-bearing and rearing (and losing) is a major theme in this family saga but the processes of having children and building families is filled with dread and destruction and dashed hopes(and no character should dare conceive out of wedlock - she will lose her baby. Though bearing children in wedlock is no guarantee, either.)
Cornwall (my favorite place I've never been) is always so atmospheric in novels - so dark and dreary and dare I say it, pregnant with suspense, but here, it seems even the atmosphere of Cornwall has miscarried, and what is left is listless and dull by the emptiness of our characters lives. Though, in the end, at least one of the women is able to find some hope, it comes to late to save this novel.
I will probably read another Kate Morton novel (the writing is very pretty and also mysterious) when I have a week in a beach chair and some Mary Elizabeth Braddon, whose melodramatic Victorian mysteries are perfect for the beach, in the bull pen.