Absolute perfection. I've never got around to reading Keane before but I love Nancy Mitford, Diana Athill and Caroline Blackwood so this cautionary tale of a family decaying in splendour was exactly what I was hoping for. The dark humour to be elicited from Aroon's spectacular naivety, her tragic misreading of her relationship with Richard and the toxic mix of entitlement and a total lack of commonsense made the story impossible to put down. I loved the grotesquery of Mummie and Papa, the unreliable narration of Aroon and the sense of doom throughout the book. The cover artwork is stunning and I think enhances the contents.

Good Behaviour proved to be the deliciously dark and funny tragicomedy I needed right now. I gobbled it up like cheddar and onion crisps, it was such a delight. Written in the 80s, I wonder how I never heard of this before? It was hilarious and sad in equal measure. Well, maybe not 'equal' as it was far funnier than I could have guessed. In Good Behaviour we dwell amongst the Irish landed gentry in the early 20th century. The St. Charles family estate is in steady decline, with money in short supply, but that is too vulgar to mention, I'm sure. Aroon tells the tale of her quirky family and at first we readers might mistake her for being painfully naive, which she may well be. Or, is she very aware and just too polite to call a spade a spade? Regardless, the story that unfolds is comedy gold of the high society sort. Aroon is a girl at a disadvantage. In the 20s girls are meant to be small and athletic and she is anything but. A big girl, she is shunned by her mother and in desperate search for affection and approval from her father and brother, mainly. As her story, and that of her family, unfolds we learn more of what they get up to and Aroon's unique view on events. Pure genius, I will look for more books written by Molly Keane and am so thankful for Virago Modern Classics and their reprint of 'classics with bite'. Good Behaviour is, certainly, the perfect example of such a work of fiction. I hope you agree.

I love Molly Keane, she was my gateway into Irish literature, fiction by women, Virago Modern Classics and more. Her earlier books reflect the dying days of the Angle Irish ascendency as it happened, this written in the early 1980s after a 30 year gap looks back and is as dark as her work gets, though perhaps witha touch more humour than some of the earlier books. It is sall the more devestating for it. Aroon St Charles is large, unlovely, and mostly unloved. She understands so much less than the reader as she tries to navigate through her own life, and she does terrible things, but are then any more terrible than the life she has been given?

Good Behaviour is an excoriating portrait of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy at the beginning of the twentieth century. Representatives of a dwindling and deeply resented class, Molly Keane’s characters exist in a world set apart from the overwhelming majority of native Irish who feature only as servants. Their lives are an endless round of horse-riding and fox-hunting; intellectual pursuits of any kind are discouraged; displays of emotion are not to be indulged; even grief at the death of a loved one must be discreetly muted. The narrator and central character, Aroon, has all the cards tacked against her. A “big girl” at a time when it is fashionable to be thin, entirely ignorant about sex, she falls in love with her brother’s best friend whom the reader can see perfectly well is homosexual. Indeed, the reader understands everything that Aroon is describing far better than she does herself. It’s not a feel-good read – we watch as Aroon’s personality is warped by her suffocating circumstances - but this is literature, doing its job, exploring the darkness, finding empathy in the stalest of environments.

In a tour de force, Keane takes a slice of Anglo-Irish history, her own formative years of the 1920s, and highlights the inherent contradictions of ‘good behaviour,’’ of the accepted social mores particular to the upper middle classes of the place and time. Thwarted on all sides from having a ‘normal’ life, Aroon maintains the manners that she is expected to adhere to, all the while doing what she must to be satisfied, opening at the end of her tale with a murder. With an unremitting focus on the main character of Aroon. Keane imbues the whole with horror and glee. Aroon could be either a tragic anti-heroine or a psychopathic monster, but she cannot be blamed for being either what her family, her society and her times force her to become. As vital and timely today as when it was first published: five stars.