I was really pleased when I won this in a draw on Savidge Reads. Practically every blog I read (and I read a lot) seemed to have rave reviews of it, and with my ongoing interest in World War Two it seemed to be a must-read.
And no, I'm not going to say I didn't enjoy it. Of course it is immensely readable and historically very interesting. As I'm sure you know, it starts in 1939, with nineteen-year-old Elise Landau setting off from her wealthy and cultured family home in Vienna to work as a maid in a stately home in south west England. I had no idea that this was an option offered to Jewish families to enable them to escape from Nazi persecution, but indeed it was, and Natasha Solomons' own aunt actually experienced this herself. Solomons captures well the terrible homesickness suffered by Elise, whose beloved parents have remained in Austria hoping to get visas to travel to New York -- the strangeness of England and the English -- the puzzled and often unfriendly attitude of the other servants, who see how different Elise is and don't know what to make of her. All very fascinating and all very believeable.
I was less impressed, though, by the love story, because of course that's really what this novel primarily is. It's OK, if you like that sort of thing, but I must say there were no surprises for me -- I predicted the outcome almost from the beginning. I was also slightly annoyed a few times by mistakes that could, and should, have been corrected by an editor. Take the second sentence of the novel: "In the darkness as I lay down to sleep, I see the Purbeck stone frontage in the glow of the afternoon". Now, call me pedantic if you like, but I get really irritated by the misuse of 'lay' for 'lie' -- this sentence is in the present tense ("I see..."), and in the present tense, 'Lay means "to place something down." It is something you do to something else. It is a transitive verb', to quote one of many grammar sites you can find at the click of a mouse. And this is not the only place in the novel where this verb is misused. Also, Elise's friend Poppy tells her she is not going to take up her offered place at Cambridge because she would not be able to get a degree. Not so! Women were granted the title of degree in the 1921. And so on. Sadly, there don't seem to be any good copy editors around any more -- and I suppose most people simply don't notice or care.
Obviously I'm in a tiny minority here as everybody else seems to have adored everything about this novel. Oh well. I'd still like to read Solomons' first novel, Mr Rosenblum's List, and no doubt when The Novel in the Viola becomes a movie, as I'm sure it will, I shall probably see it and love it. I guess I'm just an old curmudgeon, stuck in an impossibly distant past. Take no notice of me -- read and enjoy, if you haven't already.
