FICTION: Love AllBy Elizabeth Jane Howard, MacMillan, 454pp, £16.99 THIS NEW novel by Elizabeth Jane Howard comes in two sections, "Before" and "After". The absent "During", to be taken as read, concerns a literary festival in the imaginary West Country town of Melton, the run-up to which brings together the cast of characters, with the aftermath showing how relations between them have progressed.
As the title suggests (aside from its irrelevant tennis implications), this is a novel about love: losing it, pursuing it, mourning it, plunging into it, misjudging it, repudiating it. It begins with the ending of an affair: "'It isn't that I don't love you. It's - all the other things.'" The person thus dispiritingly addressed is Persephone - known as Percy - Plover, a young half-Greek Englishwoman with highly unsatisfactory, absent parents and a deep attachment to the "pirate aunt" who brought her up, garden designer Florence - Floy - Plover (Demeter to her niece's Persephone).
When Percy's liaison with a married man comes crashing down - and while she's between vague jobs in publishing - Floy transports her to Melton, to the home of a divorced, self-made millionaire businessman, Jack Curtis, whose garden she (Floy) is restoring. Along with them goes a stately black cat named Marvell, just to underline the "skillful gard'ner", "herbs and flowers" theme, which extends to nurturing in general: some people are fitted to be nurturers, others not.
Jack's manor house once belonged to the Musgrove family, and two remaining Musgroves, Thomas and Mary, brother and sister, live nearby, on a farmhouse on their old estate, running a garden centre. They share a home because Thomas's wife, Celia, has died in a car crash, and Mary is bringing up Thomas and Celia's daughter Hatty. Also attached to the household is Celia's artist brother, Francis, who - again, somewhat vaguely - is lending a hand.
These are the principal characters, though others on the periphery are accorded some attention. The events of the story take place in the late 1960s, though it has to be said that nothing of the 1960s exhilaration or hedonism gets into Howard's narrative.
The book could be set at almost any period during the 20th century - which perhaps contributes to the timeless charm and decorum of the writing. What happens? Percy is persuaded to take over the organising of the festival and makes a success of it (just as the author did with the Cheltenham Literary Festival in its early days); everyone's emotional life takes a turn or two; a death occurs, and marriage is constantly proposed (for the most part, fruitlessly). The setting moves between Melton and London - in particular, the Maida Vale house where Floy and Percy live. Incidentally, this is a replica of the house inhabited by Elizabeth Jane Howard and her then husband Kingsley Amis in the 1960s, down to the slabs of black and white marble, rescued from a skip, making a splendid conservatory floor.
When it comes to the less significant - indeed, unnecessary - characters, the author occasionally becomes careless with details. With one of these characters, a Mrs Quantock, for example, the time sequence is all over the place.
We are told that Mrs Quantock was married just before the second World War, then that she was 13 "just before the war", and finally that she cried her eyes out when her best friend's father and brother were killed at the Somme.
It is possible that Elizabeth Jane Howard is simply eager to get back to the major players in Love All's emotional tangles and indecisiveness (as most readers will be). All, interestingly, does not fall out felicitously in the final pages. The book abounds in literary allusions, from Jane Austen to Andrew Marvell; Percy's relationship with her aunt Floy is compared to Stevie Smith's with her "Lion aunt" (the "aunt" theme here is largely benign, as opposed to its equivalent in PG Wodehouse, say, or Saki).
All in all, there is much to enjoy in this leisurely, workmanlike novel, whose mellow narrative overlay doesn't preclude a certain muted sparkle.
Patricia Craig is a critic, biographer and anthologist. Her memoir, Asking for Trouble, was published in 2007