Perhaps it’s inevitable that as one gets older, one gets more interested in the World Wars. I remember finding them very boring when we covered them in school, and we all know how much dads tend to enjoy History Channel specials about various and sundry battles and maneuvers. My personal interest has been not so much in the shooty bits, but in the larger cultural trends that produced the conditions that led to war. Nationalist idealologies, in particular, played a large role in a way that is not soothing, given the current state of the world.
It seems like many World War II stories are told from the perspective of “good guys”: people who saw through the xenophobic rhetoric and did their best to resist. That’s not the kind of story that Cressida Connolly’s After The Party tells, though. When Phyllis, her husband Hugh, and their three children return to their native England in the years before World War II, she’s drawn back into the social orbits of her sisters. Both status-conscious Patricia and energetic, bossy Nina have become involved with a political movement with a charismatic leader. Phyllis sends her children to the party-affiliated summer camp Nina is running, and herself falls in line with the support for the party evinced by the people she mixes with. None of them could really be called her friends, per se, except a woman named Sarita who she does become close to. After Sarita’s husband Fergus comes on to Phyllis aggressively at a party, though, something happens that breaks the bond between the women forever.
In the wake of this, Phyllis and Hugh both become more actively involved with the party, which is gradually revealed to be the British Union of Fascists, led by Oswald Mosley. The reader has known since the beginning of the book that Phyllis eventually spends time in jail, and that turns out to be as a result of the British government’s action, after the war has begun, to imprison party members without trial as a threat to the national security of the country. There are interstitial sections that reflect Phyllis’s reflection on her party membership to a journalist researching female followers of Mosley in the 1970s, where we learn what effect the time she and Hugh spent detained had on their family…and who identified them to the government.
I found Phyllis to be a frustrating character, mostly because of the writing. Connolly seems to be confused about who, exactly, she wants Phyllis to be. She’s often portrayed as susceptible to the influence of others and kind of drifting through her life, barely reacting when she realizes her husband has been unfaithful to her. While she seems to agree with Mosley’s ideas, she doesn’t reflect on them at length and thinks much more about her family than she does politics. On the other hand, she’s also written as a dedicated fascist who refuses to renounce her support for Mosley even when doing so would seem like the most likely way to secure her release from custody, and maintains her beliefs into the 70s. Is she a detached rich lady who doesn’t really care much about anything besides her comfort and security, or a hardcore true believer? Such fluctuation might not have been bothersome if she had a less prominent role in the narrative, but as it’s entirely from her perspective, it was a significant issue. I don’t need my narrators sympathetic (and I didn’t find Phyllis to be so), but I do need them to be written with internal consistency.
It’s still a decent book, but it’s not as good as it could have been because of that characterization issue, which is a shame. I have a fondness for books that feel like the literary version of a prestige British drama movies (and sometimes end up being made into them), and this hits that spot pretty squarely. I liked the way Connolly structured the book, with the brief flash-forwards into the 70s keeping me engaged and curious about how things would play out. Apart from the problems with Phyllis as a character, I found Connolly’s writing generally strong, with elegant prose that well-suited the milieu in which the characters were situated, and the story well-paced. It was reasonably enjoyable, but I’d only really recommend it to readers who enjoy historical fiction about fancy repressed people.
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