Good Behaviour: A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick – Booker Prize Gems (Virago Modern Classics)

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A rich American husband is one way of securing the funds and the genes to keep a crumbling Anglo-Irish enterprise afloat. Once back at Ballyrankin, however, she contracted a mysterious illness that her biographer, her daughter Sally Phipps, suggests may have been psychosomatic. The book is most often described as a dark comedy and it is indeed very funny at times but mostly it makes the little hair on your back rise and groan with frustration at Aroon's naivety. A real work of craftsmanship, where the heroine is also the narrator, yet has no idea what is going on.

Her insistence on having things her own way in that first chapter as well as some of the events in it make her decidedly unappealing.I have lived for the people dearest to me, and I am at a loss to know why their lives have been at times so perplexingly unhappy.

The protagonist of Good Behaviour is Iris Aroon St Charles, daughter of an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family, who grows up with her brother Hubert in ‘Temple Alice’ one of the ‘Big Houses’, built by an ancestor as his temporary residence until inheriting his titles and estates. Aroon has had a very sheltered upbringing but she never seems to feel the need to spread her wings, experience more of life, so it is hard to place all the blame of her ignorance on her upbringing. The book—the first to boast her real name— prompted ecstatic reviews (Hilary Mantel later expressed the wish that she herself had written it), and was shortlisted for the Booker. Keane’s daughter Sally Phipps describes the event as managed on both sides with bravado, courage and politeness, none of which made any difference to the outcome: ‘A beautiful 18th-century house went up in flames.

Having finished the book and then reread that first chapter, the idea of her controlling behaviour with her mother lasting 25 years is appalling!

G. Farrell, who had won the Booker in 1973 with The Siege of Krishnapur, but it’s easy to see why Farrell’s surreal and witty portrait of postwar Anglo-Ireland in Troubles (1970) would have looked like literary kin, and Keane may well have enjoyed being promoted to the head of this arch Irish lineage.

This fine novel is made even more interesting by a 1st chapter which acts as a kind of coda for the novel. Animals, food and her brother are her consolation, her mother rarely responds even when Aroon reports that she thinks her baby brother is dead, she enquires where the staff are.

One of the servants, I don't believe it was the Nanny, provides Aroon with her only sex ed instruction, a graphic mention ending with ". It started to feel like being with them too long every time something happened like Papa and brother infecting their society with jokes about Big Girl Aroon. The only thing I found odd was that Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift which I read last year, was so very similar, so similar that I'm surprised no one has pointed this out. we know, even if she doesn’t, that this act of symbolic cannibalism is meant to perfect her revenge.There are several very transparent clues that Rose has been, to use vulgar parlance, giving the Major a hand job. This was Molly Keane’s first book in which she used her real name…prior books by her used the pseudonym of M. All my life so far I have done everything for the best reasons and the most unselfish motives,” says Aroon soon after. Molly’s happy marriage in 1939 to the much younger Robert (“Bobbie”) Keane saved her from the former fate but not the latter.