This week we return to a Furrowed Middlebrow offering, with a D. E. Stevenson story; Mrs. Tim Gets a Job. Mrs. Tim is the title character in four books of Stevenson. Mrs. Tim is the wife of a British Army Officer, and as such, is often living on her own while her husband is overseas defending the British Empire. A couple of decades ago, I may have read at least one of the earlier books, but if so I've no recollection of the story. I don't think they need to be read in order, but it probably helps. I chose this title because it was one of the most highly rated titles on Amazon of the Furrowed Middlebrow collection.
My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
Mrs. Tim Gets A Job by D. E. Stevenson B-While I enjoyed this story, I think I prefer the writing of Molly Clavering a bit more than that of Stevenson. Perhaps this is because I seem to detect a slight sense of detachment or coolness in Stevenson's writing, making it for me, just a little less engaging. Anyway, this story, the third of four Mrs. Tim stories, is set in 1946. Mrs. Tim, the wife of the British Army officer, Tim Christie, now serving in Egypt, decides to apply for and takes the job of helping run a hotel in the Scottish Border lands, though with a great deal of misgivings. The hotel owner has been forced to turn her ancestral home into a hotel in order to be able to maintain the large manor house. However, this owner is not a people person, being short and gruff with guests, so she hires Mrs. Tim to help her not only run the place, but to deal with the guests.
The story is written in the format of Mrs. Tim's diary entries, making it a first person narrative, my favorite story format. It chronicles the events leading up to her accepting the job, her experiences as she settles into the job, plus the all the various people she encounters on her travel, hotel guests, and fellow employees, each with their own little stories and, usually, romantic problems.
I felt the story ended a little abruptly, as if Stevenson had reached her word count and decided that she just needed to tie up all the the last of the little subplots in play, and call it a day. However, with this type of story, one without any important overarching narrative, allows for this type of ending.
One feature of stories like this one set in post war England is a glimpse of how long after the war ended that food rationing and a general scarcity of products remained in place. Well into the 50's times were tough in an England exhausted by six years of war. This is in stark contrast to the boom years after the war in America.
The one other thing that struck me in this story was how Stevenson treated the status of Mrs. Tim, either as the wife of a British Army officer, or by birth. She was portrayed as someone who was above the need to work - several of the characters, including her husband expressed this opinion. And while Mrs. Tim went to work anyway, she never seemed to be completely committed to it as a job. It was just something to do in the moment, after she had been turned out of the house she had been renting prior to this and with her kids in boarding schools. For example, she expected to just take the summer off from the job to spend with her two children, as guests at some relative's country estate. Keeping the hotel running in season wasn't her problem. Nice work if you can get it. One of the interesting things about these novels, no matter how idealized the stories are, is the underlying assumptions about class and society held by the writers of these stories. Most of D E Stevenson's heroines never have to work outside of the home and always have servants to do the domestic work for them inside of it, even if some of them have to scrape by on some small inheritance. The title character in Miss Buncle's Book, is an example, she had to make do with only one servant to keep house and cook for her, until she get married. Married, she then employs several servants, a cook, a maid, and a nanny to look after her children. As I said, nice work if you can get it. I suspect they reflect D E Stevenson's own life and attitude.
For my next reading adventure I am staying in the fictional Britain of the 1920's & 30's (and beyond), but hosted not by a writer of light or comic novels, but a writer of literary fiction. Stay turned to see how that goes.
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