Love in Idleness
Amanda Craig Little, Brown, 344pp, £12.99
ISBN 033048298X
This charming novel re-enacts Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream as domestic realism. The trials and tribulations of a group of English and American friends and relatives are played out against the background of a Tuscan summer holiday. Much of the pleasure afforded by the story comes from reading its author's lyrical descriptions of Italian landscapes; the rest is made up from guessing which figure represents which Shakespearian character and seeing how Amanda Craig balances her source against her retelling.
The action opens in the Casa Luna, a villa near Cortona rented out by Mr Bill Shade, who has a short beard and creates magic in Hollywood. Two local Italian women play the rustics and make up the beds for the guests, then vanish. Having arrived at the airport, the cast - hot and cross - troops on, led by Polly and Theo, and featuring four star-crossed lovers, three children who become fairies and Puck when necessary, an evil mother-in-law and Bottom masquerading as a famous TV gardening personality.
Craig takes a big risk: making most of her characters unlikeable in order to find out whether they are redeemable by love, if tenderness lurks under the boorish carapace. Theo is a workaholic businessman who can't be bothered with his children and pays no attention to his wife, Polly. She shoulders the entire burden of cooking, housework and childcare during the holiday and is seen by the others as a control freak. If she complains, she's a whinger. Her companions - lazing about, discussing sex and shopping - are all completely selfish, and never stir to give her a hand in any way. Betty, the mother-in-law, is just a bitch. When she makes racist remarks to Hemani, one of the four lovers, the others are too cowardly to shut her up. The children are little monsters: antisocial, obsessed with material things, running hysterically wild because they are in their parents' company full time and are not used to it. So here is a fine portrait of the bourgeoisie at play. The stage is set.
Many of us want holidays in order to escape from the harsh realities of daily work. These rich middle-class people do not have that particular problem, but still expect their Italian villa to provide enchantment. Sex, peace, sleep and suntans, mostly. For their fantasy to work, it has to exclude Italian people, life and culture. Even when they venture outside their stockade and visit Arezzo, they can't allow themselves to be moved by the frescoes. The forest in which they remain sealed off, bickering and cruelly flirting, is made of ego. The children, mercifully, shed their metropolitan nastiness fairly fast through spending all their time playing outdoors. Their return to nature allows them to dream, explore, invent and create, also to provide a satiric commentary on the adults' shortcomings: "Grown-ups are weirdos anyway but when they're in love, they spend all day doing stupid babyish things like kissing and lying on top of each other and even showing each other their bottoms." The children can go out of control and become unselfconscious, unlike the uptight adults. Their droll naivety, mixed with anger and resentment, then extends to the making and administering of love potions. Just as their emotions are all mixed up and projected on to each other, so their elixirs are thrown over the grown-ups, with predictably chaotic effects.
Craig's version of the four young ones all suddenly seized by lust for the wrong partner is too much of a jolt, too fantastical an interruption into her bleakly realist and blackly humorous narrative. Sensibly, she packs it into a few pages and then returns to a slower pace. How beastly the bourgeois is, opined D H Lawrence. But in this tale, under the influence of the beautiful Italian countryside and a few good meals, everyone becomes a bit nicer. Craig, a compassionate and good-tempered fairy godmother waving her wand, presides wisely and kindly over the comedy of errors.
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