Marking Time - Softcover

Elizabeth Jane Howard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330332503 ISBN 13: 9780330332507

Publisher: Pan Books, 1993

Synopsis

The second volume in the Cazalet Chronicles, recently adapted for BBC Radio 4

Home Place, Sussex, 1939. The English family at war...

The sunlit days of childish games and family meals are over, as the shadows of war roll in to cloud the lives of one English family.

At Home Place, the windows are blacked out and food is becoming scarce as a new generation of Cazalets takes up the story. Louise dreams of being a great actress, Clary is an aspiring writer, while Polly, is burdened with knowledge and the need to share it.

Marking Timeis the second volume in The Cazalet Chronicle. The next novel in the series isConfusion.

About this title

About the Author

ELIZABETH JANE HOWARDis the author of fourteen highly acclaimed novels. The Cazalet Chronicle -The Light Years, Marking Time, ConfusionandCasting Off- have become established as modern classics and have been adapted for a major BBC television series and most recently for BBC Radio 4. In 2002 Macmillan published her autobiography, Slipstream. In that same year she was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List.

From Kirkus Reviews

A perfect if inauspicious title for this second course of Howard's Cazalet Chronicles (begun with The Light Years, 1990), since this latest is all idling before something big happens--as the Cazalet writer-to-be, Clary, puts it, ``We need people to be in love with....We'll just have to wait.'' The waiting begins right after Chamberlain's ``peace with honor'' falls through and Hitler marches into Poland. At the Sussex manse of ``Brig'' Cazalet--now a blind old duffer shepherded around by his faithful spinster daughter, Rachel--the much extended Cazalet family gathers with their gas masks, not to mention orphaned babies (one of Rachel's charity), wounded soldiers, and London evacuees. The Brig's eldest son, Hugh, lamed during the Great War, stays at home to blunder along with the family timber firm and to coddle his wife, Sybil, who has incurable cancer; middle son, Edward, the womanizer, joins up, spending weekend leaves sexually abusing his beautifully budding daughter, Louise, while his wife, Villy, develops a crush on a conductor; and the last son, Rupert, goes missing in action right before his young wife, Zoe, has a baby. In addition, Howard focuses on the children of this crew, including: 17-year-old Louise, who attends acting school; Clary, Rupert's daughter by his late first wife, who nicely copes with her airheaded stepmother and fills her journal feverishly; and Polly, whose chief attribute is her goodness. By the end, Japan has drawn the US into the war; there's word of Rupert, possible romance for Clary, and as always, the Cazalets marching ever on. Comfortable, literate, but very slow lane. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pan Books
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0330332503
• ISBN 13: 9780330332507
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 5
• Number of pages: 464