Long Summer Day

It seems ages since I last read anything by Delderfield, but if anything the time since I last read his work has only made me appreciate it more. Long Summer Day, like To Serve Them All My Days, is a leisurely read, and a quintessentially English one at that. Beyond the pacing and prose, the former has in common with the latter that a wounded veteran (in this case, of the Boer war, and physically as opposed to psychologically) determines to put any thought of war behind him by retreating deep into the English countryside.

And so it is that Paul Craddock survives the Boer War to learn of his father's death - and a far greater inheritance than he expected. This he spends on the purchase of a rundown estate, Shallowford, which he determines to make over for the better of all residing there. Too, Squire and tenants alike must grapple with the rapid changes in society, from the introduction of the motor car to the debate over women's suffrage. Here, Delderfield has created a vast array of supporting characters, each unique enough to be memorable, but similar enough to fit nicely into a single estate without creating undue conflict or tension. Long Summer Day is also suffused with the foreboding of future entanglements with Germany: that the Kaiser is building his fleet is regularly put to the reader. There can be no doubt that Shallowford is on the cusp of the end, as Laurie Lee wrote, "of a thousand years' life."

As I've noted about Delderfield in the past, the one complaint, if I'm to have one, is that this book, too, is a tome, totally some 800 pages before all is said and done. That is not to say that I didn't enjoy it, but rather to say I'm quite certain I would have enjoyed it equally well at, say, 550 pages. (I should acknowledge, though, that this is the exact opposite of my complaint regarding the last book I read, Mademoiselle Chanel, whose author I accused of erasing entire years from Chanel's life for the sake, one presumes, of brevity. So perhaps there's just no pleasing me.)

All told, this book is a wonderful, leisurely stroll into a world that doesn't exist any longer. Its length requires a serious commitment of time on the part of the reader, but Delderfield has never failed to make an impression on me and I somehow feel richer for reading his works.