No Fond Return of Love

Barbara Pym is so witty and funny, and this is the wittiest and funniest of her books that I've read so far. I read so many lines out loud to Francisco that we just gave up and I read the rest of the book out loud to him. (It wasn't hard to convince him, since, as I've noted here before, he's an anglophile, and Pym is British.)

Like a ridiculous poem, Pym takes almost nonsensical themes and repeats them and plays with them until you're in tears. She mocks each character, making the most serious ones look like clowns. The line from which the book is named,

'Of course,' she went on, 'those are the people from whom one asks no return of love, if you see what I mean. Just to be allowed to love them is enough.'

is said by Dulcie, an older woman who becomes an utterly creepy and hilarious, yet somehow still sympathetic, stalker of Aylwin Forbes and, by extension, his whole family. (Really, who hasn't stalked someone and found out far too much information, delighting in each piece uncovered? Okay, okay, maybe it's just me.)

While Pym has sharp, delightful wit, the ending was weak and unsatisfying. Alwyn Forbes finally takes a wife (well, another wife after his first one and he left each other) and his choice is unbelievable--the character his is would have never chosen the woman he chose. Pym's quick turn of phrase doesn't save anything:

What a surprise it would be, not least to his family and to Dulcie herself, who had so often urged him to make a 'suitable' marriage, if, when he was free, this very marriage should come about! Yet here he was being true to type after all. For what might seem to the rest of the world an eminently 'suitable' marriage to a woman no longer very young, who could help him with his work, now seemed to him the most unsuitable that could be imagined, simply because it had never occurred to him that he could love such a person. It was all most delightfully incongruous. Just the sort of thing Aylwin Forbes would do.

Oh no. Just because you try to confuse me, Barbara Pym, doesn't mean I'll buy this nonsense. Just because Aylwin Forbes is handsome and smart, doesn't mean every old maid will swoon when he comes to propose. And really?! He's thinking about Mansfield Park on the way over? I doubt it.


(Hopkins reviews it here (and says quite rightly, "Miss Pym doesn't have the gumption to see her satire to its logical conclusion."); I also wrote about Pym's Quartet in Autumn, Excellent Women, A Few Green Leaves.)