Charlotte and Dr James Author:Guy McCrone This is a story of young love, but it is much more than a story at the end of which the couple "live happily ever after." In a rich study of three generations in Scotland and London, McCrone gives a large gallery of characters, living their lives in the different periods of time he touches. Amusing, kindly and provocative--drawn with the charact... more »erization that is a great part of his novelist's talent and has won him so many thousands of readers.
The theme of the young country doctor, James Mennock, who married Charlotte Gailes, a professor's daughter, then became a great surgeon, is conventional enough. But Guy McCrone keeps showing us what happened to them later, even as he tells us their love story. He shows us what they became and what life held in store for them.
Their granddaughter, Margaret Raymond, a vey young widow, is called back to Scotland by her grandfather's illness. Sir James Mennock, a wise old man, guesses this. And seeking a way of distracting her from her own troubles, and to keep her with her grandmother and himself, he makes old family papers available to her. Margaret, finding so many answers to her questions, becomes engrossed in these and feels impelled to write her grandparents' love story.
By these methods Guy McCrone gives us a panoramic view of two long lives; lives that were outwardly progressive and prosperous and, in the ultimate summing-up, happy. Yet lives that knew deep sorrow and some self-accusation. The kind of lives, indeed, that most of us know; for James and Charlotte Mennock are a very normal human couple.
This is a cheerful, busy book of many happenings. But it is illumined by a steady light; the light of a life-long attachment casually begun one day when a newly graduated medical student--a boy who took life very seriously--found himself binding up the injured finger of a high-spirited and pampered daughter of a university professor.
Terrific for age. Paper jacket is also good for its age.« less