The Carousel (by Rosamunde Pilcher)

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I do enjoy reading and re-reading the novels by the late Rosamunde Pilcher. She had such a talent for creating warm, believable people that I feel as if I’m saying goodbye to friends as I finish her books. I’ve been re-reading them for the third or fourth time over the past few years, and have just completed ‘The Carousel’. It’s a short book, less than 200 pages, but has always been one of my favourites.

It’s only nine years since I last read this book. I recalled the general storyline, although I had forgotten most of the details. Prue is the main character, and she narrates the book. She’s twenty-two and works for an art gallery. She’s not keen on the idea of settling down into a conventional married life. But she’s been seeing the highly presentable (and rather nice) Nigel, and has been invited to Scotland to meet his parents.

Prue’s mother is thrilled, but Prue wants an excuse to decline. So when her delightfully bohemian aunt Phoebe calls to say she’s broken her arm, Prue has no hesitation in agreeing to go and stay with her for a couple of weeks, to help out and do some driving.

On the train down to Cornwall Prue meets the rather nervous ten-year-old Charlotte. In one of Pilcher’s typical coincidences, they are going to the same village. Charlotte knows Phoebe well; she’s been to stay with her grandmother in the village before, and has spent time with Phoebe.

Charlotte is usually at boarding school but the boiler blew up. Her mother has gone abroad and her father works hard and doesn’t want her about. Her grandmother in Cornwall isn’t exactly warm and cosy but has agreed to have her to stay. Prue is quite taken with Charlotte, and also feels desperately sorry for her.

This sets the scene for a gentle story, encompassing some very different but extremely likeable people. A young man appears, who was a former student of Phoebe’s late partner Chips. He is quite well-known in the art world, but doesn’t much like fame and his desire to be free and unencumbered is even stronger than Prue’s. But in the meantime they get along very well…

There’s not a great deal of action in this book. The carousel which gives its name to the title is a minor device, really; a toy made for Prue by Chips years previously, out of an old record player. Charlotte loves playing with it, and Prue is happy to see it loved; but it’s not really significant, other than as a symbol of the connection between them.

The story is more about Charlotte and her family than anyone else. Prue recognises that, despite her parents having divorced when she was younger, and despite being a very different person from her mother, she had a happy childhood and always knew she was loved. Charlotte does not have this security. Yet she’s quite a self-assured child, and readily opens up when offered a listening ear.

The setting - contemporary in the early 1980s - is very much in the well-off upper middle classes. Boarding schools for children are not unusual, and everyone has at least a daily help for housework, and probably cooking too. Charlotte’s grandmother, in one scene, appears unable even to make a cup of coffee. It’s an alien world, one which I wasn’t part of even when this book was written. Equality, apparently, didn’t exist. Attitudes are sexist - although Prue rather rebels against that - and undoubtedly classist. It has to be accepted as appropriate for the era, and the people the author was writing about.

There are no really ‘bad’ people in most of Rosamunde Pilcher’s books. Charlotte’s mother is selfish and materialistic, but not malicious. And she doesn’t actually appear in this book, other than in discussion. People are three-dimensional because they make mistakes; yet these mistakes are redeemed in so many ways. Kindness, generosity and hospitality are important values displayed by the people we are supposed to like, and it works.

It’s light-weight, poignant in places, and very enjoyable. I finished ‘The Carousel’ all too quickly, sorry once again to leave these people behind, but looking forward, already, to re-reading once more in another nine or ten years.

Review copyright 2019 Sue's Book Reviews