Love in Idleness by Amanda Craig
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Despite its slow start, with seemingly an impossible number of characters, Craig pulls this story together in a surprising way. We know it’s based on Shakespheare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. And even still, she still manages to delight and surprise us. In a strange way, what comes out of this is a middle class critique of the wealthy. The loss of influence of the wealthy matron, and the rise of a single mother seem to be the inevitable pact that Craig makes. We admire the wealth. We want the lifestyle, and yet, this is only made possible due to the presence of the wealth and the exotic location of being somewhere (rich and idle) that this story could even happen. Despite the valorization of the middle class value of working for your own way, this story isn’t possible for middle class people.
All the same, Craig manages to make this a compelling read for me, despite the sloven pace. She finds her tempo towards the end, and even though we can tell what the ending will be, it’s still steam rolls forward with all the fury of a comedy. Perhaps this is due to the writer’s energy more than anything else.
The only complaint I have about the story, other than its pacing, is that her attempts to speak for the daughter seem too much. She doesn’t speak through the daughter’s voice, but overlays onto the daughters attitude observations worded concisely as an adult would make. This is a bit detracting, for the “magic” of the People seem only possible through the eyes of a child, and those eyes may, at times, feel a bit contrived.
The burdens of modern motherhood also feel a bit overlaid. The character of Polly and Meenu both add a dimension of reflexivity that doesn’t detract from the story, but adds ruffage that make the entire cast seem more real as people. In a strange way, Polly and Meenu thus “switch places” though this seemed more accidental than planned, since Polly didn’t reflect on this positional twist whatsoever.
Craig’s “twist” with the husband too, didn’t seem terribly put on as an afterthought but it did seem a little deus ex machina. The little brother’s explanation of his big brother also seemed too much like a reflexive self justification. So I thought that Theo’s storyline could have been explained better. In a way, the “update” of Shakespheares work was truly an update, as it told the story through the normalcy of a sitcom cast, meant to appeal to idle upper middle class liberals, who would want a happy ending for everyone.
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