Brooding on war that shall ride rough-shod
The Shooting Party by Isabel Colegate
Isabel Colegate’s most well-known novel feels so intensely ‘period’ in its narrative and descriptive prose that it’s easy to forget that it was written with the benefit of almost seventy years’ hindsight. Confident and compact, The Shooting Party reveals, through the prism of Colegate’s astute backward gaze, that new Georgian Age which was still clinging to its Edwardian mores two years after the late king’s death; an age facing decline even in its pomp, even before war tore its heart away.
The men and women in the fields bent again over the soil whose deeply familiar demands dictated their lives.
Isabel Colegate
Undertones of that war (to paraphrase the pastoral Georgian poet, Edmund Blunden, whose line serves as title for this review) are everywhere in Colegate’s essentially rural text, from the pheasant poults that are raised with more care before their slaughter than the country’s youth ever were, to the whistle-blasts that signal the beaters’ steady walk in line, driving the birds towards the guns. Like Colegate, we know that many wartime recruits were found to be undersized and undernourished; like her, we know that the blowing of whistles would soon be the sign for another walk, towards other guns. Sorrow awaits each of her textured, true characters; neither conceit nor compassion, fortune nor grace, will save them.
Are we really all so beautiful and brave, she thought, or do we just think we are?
Isabel Colegate
Yet Colegate’s eye seems to have been in many ways as affectionate as it was critical. Her most overtly satirical character, by far, is a socialist agitator and de facto anti-bloodsports campaigner, who has no idea how to meet the economic reality of his utopian aspirations and is offered up as a pathetically risible figure, in sharp contrast to the landed squire who knows precisely the cost of maintaining a country estate and its dependents, and who represents the steadying influence of continuity even while knowing that his era is drawing to a close. Tom the poacher, in his cottage, is shown as being just as happy as Sir Randolph in his manor, and is in many ways the happier man, not bound by the weight of history or the constraints of expectation. When tragedy strikes, it strikes them both.
Dismiss these things if you like, but they are the structure of our lives and if we lose respect for them we lose respect for ourselves.
Isabel Colegate
Even as we acknowledge the vast societal gulfs and inequalities which existed in that Edwardian twilight, the iniquities in the midst of the idyll, we cannot help but mourn the passing of an age which was beautiful in so many ways. The quiet, unmechanised landscape of Colegate’s novel belongs to a generation who, rich and poor, would know the horrors of mechanised warfare all too soon. The Shooting Party is more elegy than polemic; an epitaph among the many.
In memory of Isabel Colegate, 10 September 1931 to 12 March 2023.
© The Unhurried Reader 2023
Thank you for this! I am an Edwardian at heart, in more ways than can be told, and your brilliant review has convinced me that I would love this book.