99 Novels Best in English Since 1939 by Burgess Anthony

Author:Burgess, Anthony [Anthony, Burgess]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-06-16T04:00:00+00:00

The Mighty and Their Fall

IVY COMPTON-BURNETT [1961]

Ivy Compton-Burnett's first novel, Dolores, appeared as long ago as 1911, but in 1925 she embarked on the highly original series of fictional structures that begins with Pastors and Masters and ends with The Mighty and Their Fall. Henry Green's titles follow a pattern of accidence, Ivy Compton-Burnett's a pattern of syntax. Brothers and Sisters, Men and Wives, A House and its Head, Elders and Betters — so the stream proceeds, all titles reducible to "(Adj) Noun AND (Adj) Noun". The novels themselves are similarly reducible to a single theme — the consequences of the breaking of the more violent of the ten commandments in respectable upper-class homes, the setting always being late Victorian or Edwardian England. There is a kind of trickery, the sense of a formula, but one cannot read just a couple of the novels and think one knows them all: one needs the whole corpus, not just the underlying pattern. The technique is deliberately formal, even stilted. The following comes from The Mighty and Their Fall:

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