KEY POINTS:
It's the middle of World War I. A maid working in a boarding hostel that is falling apart is becoming certain she will never find a husband; a young boy is furtively looking at a breast enlargement advertisement in a magazine upstairs; and downstairs, his mother gets the dreaded visit to advise her of her husband's death.
Moggach, who also wrote the screenplay for the recent film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightley, takes delight in exploring the changing world of 1918 through the world of the Palmerston Street boarding house run by Eithne, her son Ralph and the maid Winnie.
The characters are trapped in the familiar war-novel world of grief and hardship, and they live by the familiar refrain of "if not now, I may be gone tomorrow', but Moggach is skilled at giving them depth and variety. The tight-knit group struggles to put decent food on the table for the boarders - the elderly woman who wets the bed, the shell-shocked war victim whose wife must drive a bus for money, the blind veteran who expounds Marx and seduces Winnie. Meanwhile, the local butcher takes a shine to Eithne and barrels into the dingy world of the hostel, marrying Eithne and flooding her world with money - and meat. His influence changes everything (in an already unstable world) and throws up many questions about the decisions made in a time of war.
Moggach subtly shows the passing of time through the introduction of new technology - a vacuum cleaner, a motor car, electricity. The descriptions are beautifully detailed - when the lights are first turned on in the house, the inhabitants note cobwebs they had never seen before and bald spots where they thought there was hair. Such moments and the small twists of plot and believable characters kept me reading this book.
*Random House, $34.99
