Mother and Son

 Succumbing to my Ivy Compton-Burnett addiction again, and happening upon a title I had not yet read, I plunged into Mother and Son (1955), a late, immensely enjoyable, very funny and indeed almost mellow work (which deservedly won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize). 
Mother and Son is a quite straightforward affair, driven by the interactions between two households – one of spinsters and a cat (of whom more later), the other a familiar Compton-Burnett set-up: tyrannical elderly head of household (female), somewhat ineffective partner (her husband), somewhat ludicrous middle-aged son, and two young nephews and a niece who act as a sharply perceptive, truth-telling chorus. The action begins with the tyrannical Miranda Hume interviewing a potential 'companion', who retires hurt after a bruising interrogation, taking up a comparable position in the nearby household of spinsters, the younger of whom, Hester, who is something of a free spirit, duly heads for the Hume household to make herself useful there. As usual in the fictional world of Ivy Compton-Burnett, there are startling revelations – a little cluster bomb of them in this case – which turn everything upside down. As a result, rash courses of action are embarked on, but this time they are soon abandoned, and everything returns to something like normal (with the difference that everyone now knows who they are, which they didn't before). 
  The most strongly drawn character is the middle-aged, mother-devoted son, Rosebery (known to the children as 'Rosebud'). Hilary Spurling, Ivy's great biographer, describes him perfectly as 'almost an honorary woman: a repressed and virginal elderly queen whose virtually complete lack of self-knowledge enables him to make wildly indiscriminate advances to wildly unsuitable partners in a state of semi-permanent sexual agitation'. The other strongest character is not human, but a cat called Perseus, the object of the spinsters' devotion. He is, in their eyes, a creature of more than human insight and wisdom, but to anyone else Perseus is all cat. Here he is in action, after Hester fears she has upset his tender sensibilities: 
'"Poor Plautus, has he gone away to cry by himself? I must go and comfort him."
She went out with this purpose, but found it was not Plautus who needed comfort. He was sitting on the grass behind the house, with an air of doing something deeply congenial, his eyes on some birds, who were fluttering and crying under his openly sinister scrutiny. It was true that he knew things that they did not, and he was engaged with them at the moment.'