Harnessing Peacocks (2003)

By Mary Wesley
I think Mary Wesley is most famous for her book The Camomile Lawn, which I haven’t read. I have read a few of her others though, and she is an author that is worth trying out, if you haven’t already. This book is not one of her best – my favourite to date has been The Vacillations of Poppy Carew – but still quite enjoyable. She tends to write about the same sort of characters a lot, and in this book I didn’t find her set of characters as likeable or convincing.

One thing I have liked about Mary Wesley’s books is that her heroines tend to be unconventional, but maybe this one went a bit too far. In this book, the heroine (Hebe) runs away from home as a teenager as she is pregnant and her family wants her to have an abortion. Many years later, she supports her son by travelling around the countryside and cooking for various elderly ladies and having flings with their sons, as a paid mistress. All men in the book seem to develop an uncontrollable passion for Hebe but her “business” relationships are all very nice and well-mannered and end very tidily when they need to. OK, it’s unconventional, and maybe I’m just a prude, but I mean, come on!! How likely is this?? Still I suppose they ARE British.

In general Wesley’s blokes aren’t as well written or as three-dimensional, and the ones in this book just seem to be arrogant and bad-tempered (except perhaps for Hebe’s son) and you don’t get to know them well enough to care about them particularly.

Rating: 6 out of 10