Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 17, 1990 TAG: 9006200004
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: C4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by HARRIET LITTLE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A professional woman I admire professes to avoid all fiction less than 100 years old, because the demands of her career and family leave little time for pleasure reading. Jane Austen and Charles Dickens are among her favorites.
Many other readers may share her view, and often with good reason. Best-selling fiction frequently offers little more than rerun plots of soap-opera depth, involving improbably wealthy and beautiful people far removed from life's experiences and realities. But not all best-selling authors are so shallow; some are exceptional in their chosen areas. Pat Conroy is one, and so is Rosamunde Pilcher.
Her "The Shell Seekers" was a first-class piece of work and a best-seller. Her newest, "September," is already on the list, and it too is excellent fiction.
Strathcroy, in the Highlands of Scotland, provides the setting. It is, in the words of one of the characters, "just a little place on the way to somewhere else . . . It sounds dreadfully dull." She goes on to describe the "wet summers" and the beautiful winters which, in harsh weather, increase the isolation. But she stresses the early fall, September, as the best time of year with its hunt balls, parties, the annual shooting and generally increased social activity.
Thus, Rosamunde Pilcher sets her novel in that month and centers its plot on a long-planned 21st birthday party in mid- September.
The story develops and builds toward this date as do the delightfully varied characters. The families most central to the plot are the Airds; Edmund, Virginia, their young son Henry and Edmund's widowed mother, Violet; and the Balmerinos; Archie and Isobel, the Laird and his Lady, and their immediate family. Pilcher weaves complexities into these characterizations that reveal altogether human and real people set against a plot which attains equal complexities as events and other characters emerge.
As time's passage moves the characters closer to the birthday party, a net almost seems to enclose the characters as they approach and finally arrive at Strathcroy.
Fascinating as the plot proves to be, though, Pilcher's true strengths are her marvelous descriptions and her characterizations. One can almost smell the night air, "like fresh spring water," and share Archie Balmerino's renewed faith in the future when he can say, "maybe its fangs had been drawn" in reference to a crippling nightmare from a past he cannot face or discuss.
Will readers still be turning to "September" 100 years from now? No one can predict, with any accuracy, which novels will stand time's test of future value or appreciation. I, however, am glad to have shared the lives of the people of Strathcroy and I hope many others will enter and love Pilcher's Scottish world.
by CNB