Helpful Score: 1
E.F. Benson manages to be deeply sympathetic to and satirical about the manifold social changes following the Great War. While mournful of the end of stately manor house shooting parties, he can see that such refined leisure activities and the people who partake in them have petrified and become outdated. Though mocking the Bright Young Things for their burning desire for constant change and amusement, he understands the loneliness at the heart of their late night revels and bad behaviour.
Part parable, part elegy, this tragi-comic novel --more a memoir-- is full of Benson's opinions and observations of the deep rift in English society caused by the great war. Upon publication (1932), he was still so close to events that some of his assertions of fact are false (fewer women had paid employment outside the home after the war than before and during it) but as an idosyncratic portrait of a generation by someone who lived through it, As We Are shines.
Part parable, part elegy, this tragi-comic novel --more a memoir-- is full of Benson's opinions and observations of the deep rift in English society caused by the great war. Upon publication (1932), he was still so close to events that some of his assertions of fact are false (fewer women had paid employment outside the home after the war than before and during it) but as an idosyncratic portrait of a generation by someone who lived through it, As We Are shines.
A fun book by the author of the Mapp and Lucia series.
