Nobody else can touch her as a satirist, tragedian, and dissector of human behaviour. I have read and re-read Molly Keane more, I think, than any other writer. You read it with mounting horror and hilarity as you begin to grasp her delusion.ĭark, complex, engaging. A real work of craftsmanship, where the heroine is also the narrator, yet has no idea what is going on. It’s a tragi-comedy set in Ireland after the First World War. Though she herself tells the tale, we somehow see her morality's disastrous consequences. Molly Keane's Good Behaviour presents a character whose own strict Christian code wreaks havoc on all those around her. Keane’s prose roils with affect denied but persistently, pungently alive. There are many moments of brilliant, farcical comedy. She must make us see all the things that Aroon doesn’t see. Keane has set herself a technical challenge. Keane’s brilliant sleight of hand is to allow her blinkered heroine to narrate her own development from neglected child, to ungainly debutante, to bitter spinster: Aroon understands nothing, yet she reveals all. In the pages that follow she will make her case, reminiscing about her youth among the hunting-and-fishing classes of Ireland, a faded aristocracy dedicated to distraction even as their fortunes dwindle. “All my life so far I have done everything for the best reasons and the most unselfish motives,” says Aroon soon after. In fact, a single whiff of the stuff is enough to knock the old lady dead.
Charles prepares to serve her invalid mother a splendid luncheon-the silver gleams, the linens glow-of rabbit mousse, a dish her mother despises. Is it possible to kill with kindness? As Molly Keane’s Booker Prize–short-listed dark comedy suggests, not only can kindness be deadly, it just may be the best form of revenge. May 2021 selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club.
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