Tony's Reviews > Lolly Willowes

This made David Mitchell's All-Time Top-Ten List, sorta: http://www.toptenbooks.net/authors/da...

That maybe explains The Bone Clocks.

I'm of two minds about this, though. I loved the imagery, and whole passages that made me want to applaud. Lolly goes to nurse, late in the First World War. The recruiting posters have bleached.

The ruddy young man and his Spartan mother grew pale, as if with fear, and Britannia's scarlet cloak trailing on the waters bleached to a cocoa-ish pink. Laura watched them discolor with a muffled heart. She would not allow herself the cheap symbolism they provoked. Time will bleach the scarlet from a young man's cheeks, and from Britannia's mantle. But blood was scarlet as ever, and she believed that, however despairing her disapproval, that blood was being shed for her.

And I like when Lolly had had enough of her lawyer brother, Henry:

"Have done with your trumpery red herring!" she cried.

It is then that the unmarried Lolly goes off on her own. As she tells Henry: Nothing is impractical for a single, middle-aged woman with an income of her own.

She soon wonders: Did God, after casting out the rebel angels and before settling down to the peace of a heaven unpeopled of contradiction, use Adam as an intermediate step?

This is the point in the book where Mitchell would bring out the zap guns. But Warner chooses allegory instead. Lolly finds a baby kitten; or the kitten finds her. Every kitten needs a name. "What shall you call it?"

Laura remembers a picture she saw long ago, a woodcut of Matthew Hopkins, the witch-finder. Here, I found it for you:



"I shall call it Vinegar," she answered.

Because every witch needs a familiar. It's like this:

"It's like this. When I think of witches, I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded. I see them, wives and sisters of respectable men, chapel members, and blacksmiths, and small farmers, and Puritans. ... You know. Well, there they were, there they are, child-rearing, house-keeping, hanging washed dishcloths on currant bushes; and for diversion each other's silly conversation, and listening to men talking together in the way that men talk and women listen. Quite different to the way women talk, and men listen, if they listen at all."

She is talking to Satan when she says that. He listens.

_______________ ________________ ______________

Two final things"

One, read Kelly's 'review' of this. Just read it.

Second, I like absolute truisms nestled in the books I read. Like this: One has to offer marriage to a young woman who has picked dead wasps out of one's armpit. I mean, who could argue with that?