A house of Children

From its Proustian beginning to its Joycean overtones, this is a wonderful novel about childhood - the magical, imaginative world inhabited by children. Evelyn Corner, the main character who is now an adult, reflects back on the days of his youth, especially the long summer days spent with childhood friends and relatives at swimming parties and sailing, exploring the rural countryside, getting into mischief. He and the others decide to write and perform a play, and it's a huge disaster. Later on they are all taken to a performance of Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST, and Corner is transformed: the experience pushes him to become the writer he now is. (Cary admitted the novel was autobiographical.) But it's not so much what the children do that makes reading this book so satisfying, but rather the sensations that are fostered from the memory of those things. It reminded me somewhat of what Alice's sister must have experienced after Alice has awakened from her dream of Wonderland. Life is mysterious and marvelous, but it's also rather sad because out knowledge and perceptions are ever changing as circumstances change. Corner experiences this with regard to his father. This is an early Cary effort, and it's one of his best books.