All in the family

In “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand,” Simonson deftly and wittily addresses serious issues — class, race, religious frictions, greed, and the trying ties of family. The centerpiece of the plot is a tender love story involving 68-year-old Major Ernest Pettigrew (Ret.), a proper, reserved ex-Army man, and Jasmina Ali, 10 years younger, proprietor of the village shop, an Englishwoman of Pakistani descent. The setting, Edgecombe St. Mary, is, superficially, a stock English country town, the sort of setting familiar to Anglophile readers and fans of BBC mysteries. But the town is changing, becoming multicultural, threatened by property developers, invaded by newly rich city people buying country cottages.

The story opens with the major in his housecleaning costume, a crimson, clematis-patterned housecoat. He has just learned of his brother’s death. Upset, he neglects to remove the housecoat before answering the doorbell. He finds Mrs. Ali, at this point an acquaintance, on his doorstep on an errand. Seeing that the major is dizzy with shock, Mrs. Ali persuades him to sit down while she prepares tea. They talk about their late spouses, their families, and begin to forge a bond.

Mrs. Ali is a great reader of English literature, like the major an admirer of Kipling. Soon he is plotting ways to see her and slowly their friendship begins to blossom. But there are obstacles. No one seems to look kindly on their very proper relationship. Not the major’s crass, money-mad son, Roger. Not Mrs. Ali’s manipulative brother-in-law or her surly, Muslim fundamentalist nephew. Not the “blunt, tweedy” women of the town. Not the golf-club ladies planning a dinner dance with an Indian theme who don’t know the difference between Muslims and Hindus and want Mrs. Ali, “the only vaguely Indian woman we know,” to find them some “suitably ethnic bartenders.”

The major’s relationship with Mrs. Ali allows him to see his world in a very different light. Their growing affection encourages Mrs. Ali to entertain possibilities she would never have imagined. Simonson’s debut is graceful, funny, perceptive, and satisfying.

Delaney’s “Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show” is wonderful entertainment, a fat, discursive novel, written with style and humor by a masterful storyteller. It encompasses Irish history and politics, a mystery, a quest, and a coming-of-age story.

Benedict MacCarthy narrates, looking back to 1932 when he was 18. In that tumultuous year, with the young Republic of Ireland poised for a crucial election, Ben’s father abandons his family and his prosperous farm to join Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show. Ben’s mother sends him to bring his father home, and so begins the innocent Ben’s odyssey and education.

His father is mesmerized by the beautiful actress Venetia Kelly, “a young woman of remarkable talent and passion.” Soon Ben finds himself in her thrall, rivaling his father for Venetia’s attentions.

The show mixes tumbling, singing, and broad humor, with Venetia’s dramatic recitations of poetry and scenes from Shakespeare rounding out the bill. The finale is Venetia’s ventriloquist act with Blarney, an irrepressible dummy who specializes in cutting observations about Irish politics.

The complicated plot has many well-drawn characters, including a true villain, Venetia’s grandfather Thomas Aquinas “King” Kelly, a dangerous crook who specializes in land fraud and plots to turn Ireland into a Fascist state. The charm of this novel is in the digressions, which are many and entertaining, illuminating history, politics, myth, literature, and the mysteries of human nature.

“Arcadia Falls,” the latest of Goodman’s addictive literary thrillers, unfolds, like her first, “The Lake of Dead Languages,” at a boarding school in upstate New York. The school, Arcadia, is located near the village of Arcadia Falls where newly widowed Meg Rosenthal has come to teach. Both novels involve adolescent girls, and both have plenty of the creepy atmosphere Goodman does so well, but similarities between the two are superficial.

Meg is accompanied by her teenage daughter, Sally, resentful at being snatched away from her privileged life on Long Island. Meg is reeling from the premature death of her husband and the discovery that he left them nearly penniless. Meg hopes the job will not only be a fresh start but will provide the opportunity to complete her PhD thesis on a collection of fairy tales written by the school’s founder, Vera Beecher, and illustrated by her lover, Lily Eberhardt.

Arcadia, started as an artists’ colony for women, became a private school in the 1940s. It’s an eccentric place, to put it mildly, where students take an interest in witchcraft and voodoo and are encouraged to celebrate pagan festivals. An appropriately Gothic fog of foreboding hovers over the campus even before the mysterious death of a student, a death strangely similar to that of Eberhardt.

Goodman lays on the sinister atmosphere to great effect. The ending has so many twists that readers may feel slightly dizzy by the time they put down this novel. Goodman delivers an engaging, original story.

Diane White writes every month about new light and popular fiction.