I was only a couple of pages in to ‘The Light Years,’ volume one of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s series of novels about the Cazalet family, when I thought, ‘it’s going to suck so much when this is over.’ You know you’ve found a truly great book when you feel sad that you’ll never again, in your life, get to read it for the first time. I enjoyed my love-struck, luscious melancholy, the beginning of a new obsession, which only the very best books provide.
After that excitable introduction, I hope I have persuaded you to give this series a try. I remain firmly committed to the belief that the right book finds you at the right time. It’s my superstition, that I like to believe in as a little treat to myself. The stakes really couldn’t be lower, it affects absolutely nobody, but I maintain it is true: if you keep yourself open to the promise of a new book – pay attention to what your favourite authors say they’re reading, notice if a certain book keeps appearing in different places – there it will be. Don’t overthink it. It’s your new book. It’s here for a reason. I hadn’t heard of the Cazalet Chronicles until this year, when it kept popping up in interviews and articles I was reading; a Baader–Meinhof moment. I read of Hilary Mantel’s and Marian Keyes’ admiration for Howard’s work. I took the message seriously, and ordered all five. They arrived in a satisfying Chunk of Book, a big block wrapped in plastic, reformulating into five novels when I sliced into it.
The books arrived, fortuitously, at the time that I deleted my Instagram account, in an ongoing process of severing myself from addictive social media. I was trying to recover my attention span, and knew that my mind had somewhat deteriorated, and I was sure the culprit was my phone. I had been suffering horrible mental glitches, stopping mid-sentence as a word I was grasping for wasn’t there – taking a painfully long time to remember words like phenomenon, or conspiracy, or Baader-Meinhof. With Instagram gone from my life, I needed a novel to fill all that time, and to help me re-learn how to concentrate. I needed the almost impossible: a story that was, on the surface of it, easy to read and gripping, but underneath, a work of hefty substance.
The Chronicles follow the fortunes of the Cazalet family from the late thirties to the end of the 1950s. They are a congenial and generous, slightly shabby upper-class family, rambling between the country pile in Sussex and their various London homes. All very Downton Abbey, except once you’re in this world, you realise there is nothing predictable here. Hilary Mantel describes the novels as ‘less cosy than they appear.’ Howard’s creation is a wholly believable reality in which the reader can reside, journeying through life’s vicissitudes and miracles, the great unknowable, uncontrollable, horrible, surprising, amazing ride. No character is a stereotype, even those who appear fleetingly are fully realised beings. We even get inside the mind of the cook’s cat in one delightful moment. It is a wildly skilful writer who can render from one imagination a cast of people who behave unfailingly like, well, real people do.
The novel moves through every character’s view in limited third person, so we are privy to the corners and cupboards of everyone’s minds in turn. This allows us to know, better than they do, when they are misunderstanding each other, or when their thoughts run along the same tracks. A husband frets over how to broach with his wife his worries about her health, and his wife, meanwhile, is working hard to conceal her illness from her husband.
The warm enclave of a large, well-off family is a haven for some of its members, dangerous and precarious for others. The Victorian values of the grandparents – nicknamed the Brig and the Duchy – casts a long shadow over the lives of their adult children and the many grandchildren. In some ways this is benign – the belief in fresh air and cold baths and straight-back chairs as vital to one’s health. In other ways, the views of the elders cause trouble and pain that expands over time and through the generations. It is taken as given that men are more important than women, that women are natural caregivers – self-effacing, undemanding – and men naturally join the family business, where the only qualification for a top job is the surname Cazalet. The barbaric outcomes of Victorian morality are most evident in the case of the Duchy’s only daughter, Rachel. That she is in love, her whole life, with a woman, is somehow impossible for her immediate family to see, let alone talk about.
One of the beneficiaries of this status quo is Edward, the middle son, who makes it back from the trenches ‘unscathed’ (in his own words) and proceeds to take his dues from life, which include a gentleman’s club in London, a wife and three children, a mistress, days away from the office whenever he feels like indulging in the dissolute pleasure of his class – hunting, good wine. He’s charming and handsome, generous and convivial – he can’t bear for anyone to be upset with him – and he makes every effort to live in the present moment. We come to understand that the present moment is all he can really manage. When he makes a drunken pass at his teenage daughter Louise one night – grabs her breasts, tries to kiss her – his superficial charm, his life in the shallows, is seen in a new way. He has monstrous things inside, destructive compulsions that leap out, uncontrollable. He doesn’t think about it. He copes with himself by not thinking too much about anything. Poor Louise knows instinctively that she can’t tell anyone what he’s done. He’s the adored husband, brother, uncle, son. Nobody in this family will believe her.
I was ready to hate Edward, and yet, and yet. Years later, after he endures a serious illness and a brush with death, Louise comes to visit him. He is shrunken and spooked, and, as if it might be his last chance to explain himself, his ghosts appear to them both: he tells her of shooting men in the head (‘our side’) in the trenches, just to put them out of their misery. She thinks of him at the start of the war, a sheltered teenage boy sent into unfathomable hell. He was broken at that age, in a way that cannot be fixed. Earlier in the books, Edward’s brothers reflect on the almost unbelievable continuity of Edward’s youth, the way he appeared to bounce back to civilian life, as if his time in the war simply hadn’t happened to him.
This one story, the awful, forever undecided parry between past and present, between one character’s darkest compulsions and his victim, is only one strand in the sprawling tapestry. The Brig, having founded the business that provides the Cazalet fortune, derives the greatest satisfaction from the expansion of the Surrey home to accommodate the ever-growing family. The Duchy tends the flourishing garden and organises the menus and activities for the long summer months when everyone arrives ‘home’ from London. The family draws outsiders into its orbit, turns family friends, over time, into honorary Cazalets. This family – the family – is larger than the sum of its parts. All of life is here, and a great deal of it is tender and kind. The journey that the young, beautiful, self-absorbed Zoe must travel is perhaps one of the most moving. I always remember Michael Wood (on Nabokov’s novels), remarking how often kindness is missing from romantic love. Zoe views her beauty as a remarkable asset, and also, the only one she has. She utilises it to get what she wants, which, sadly, is just presents. Romance, for her, means jewellery, holidays, tidbits. As the young wife of Rupert Cazalet, she is out of place in the family, deemed a bit frivolous, rather useless – and for her part she finds them all desperately unglamorous. Life finds its way to infiltrate her enamelled self-regard. Once Zoe begins to love herself and love someone else – with curiosity, with kindness – she can survive anything.
There are moments I will never be able to forget: Rupert watching Zoe take forever to remove her make-up at night, in thrall to her reflection; heavily pregnant Sybil Cazalet, feeling the first pains of labour, alone in the drawing room, and out of her immense, paralysing fear, pretending to herself that nothing is happening. There are small moments, too many to count. Two characters falling in love: ‘she stopped talking and he kept on listening.’ The way a character’s self-pity is described as having a matching ‘subterranean self-hatred.’ The details of life: flypaper in cold pantries, studded with bluebottles, motoring chocolate, ‘gin and it’ (gin and vermouth), ladies ink (violet), silk stockings, coffee-coloured night gowns, the bewitching brands of cigarette (Passing Clouds for Rachel, and for the younger women, de Reszke Minors).
I was of course bereft when it was over, and rather than dwell I immediately went back to the bookshelves to find something else to read. I was also grateful, because these novels brought back to me – as I so hoped they would – the love of reading. I had rediscovered things I hadn’t even noticed were missing, most beloved of all, the time just before sleep when you turn away from the world and immerse yourself in fiction, warm in bed. Like, I imagine, a whole lot of people, I had fallen into the habit of doomscrolling before lights out. Now I remembered how I had spent my teen years and early twenties, always with this last, quiet, private communion with a book, when the days’ work is done, before sleep takes over. What a terrible thing to have lost, and what an ordinary and tremendous joy to have found again.
Perhaps the most striking thing, in 2024, is the generosity and grace afforded to Howard’s characters. Nobody is one thing; we are all good and bad. Edward is a monster and he is still a man. He’s the coward with a Victoria Cross. His confession to his daughter of the things he did in the war are not placed as some kind of excuse for his abusive behaviour – no clockwork plotting and easy endings here – but neither is he deemed beyond redemption. He continues through the years to try and mend what he has broken, and even strives somewhat confusedly toward ‘doing the right thing,’ in other parts of his life, and he emerges, surprisingly, as far more astute than his brothers when the family’s fortunes are at risk. These novels – all good novels – are interested in individuals, their mess and confusion, their heroism and their worst acts, the ‘dark palaces’ of our hearts, as James Joyce has it. No good novel casts easy judgement. Social media seems, sometimes, that it is entirely about casting judgement, about the herd instinct, the malicious pile-ons, the performative righteousness, and this seems more obvious the less time I spend glued to it. I still fall back into bad habits now and then – Imgur and Reddit being my elder millennial vices of choice – but the more time I have devoted to books, the kinder our world has seemed; it is good and bad, but on balance, more good than bad. I thought I would miss Instagram a lot, but after it was gone, I couldn’t really remember what had been so great about it. The attraction just evaporated. Without it, I was a lot less bothered all the time, and I finally found the wherewithal, the concentration, to not only read some books, but write about them here, too.
What I’m trying to say is, I think it’s a really good idea to read more books. Social media scrolling is like scrabbling around for crumbs. Demeaning, unsatisfying. Books are exquisite meals in Michelin starred places, worth the diversion. Choose wisely, tuck in.
Amy Jardine 