Friends and Lovers

Helen Macinnes, best known for Cold War spy stories, uses her intense style of character study to detail this love-at-first-sight romance, complicated by sabotage from both families. David (a student from London) and Penelope (a debutante from Edinburgh meet at a vacation hideaway on an Irish island. Penny's family use ridicule and classism to label David as not worthy. Her questioning artistic spirit has never fully fit into family expectations, but David is viewed as the ultimate threat to family loyalty and parental discipline. David's family expect him to sacrifice all to become breadwinner in support of their own vainglorious pursuits. So the new couple carry on their romance largely in secret from their family, and school and workplace friends replace their family as supportive mainstays. Their developing relationship require each to rethink their goals and how they might reach them. Their growing maturity (very satisfying) brings realistic conflicts that speed them to the stories climax. A character-study driven romance.

I was amazed at the quality of writing, the thoughtfulness and the insight in Friends and Lovers. It is as good as Jane Austen's best--Pride and Prejudice. Full of ideas and perfect sentences. Wonderful. It actually made me fall in love with the author, Helen MacInnes. I can't wait to read more of her stuff, and I wish she was around today so I could win her heart.

Like with "Rest And Be Thankful", this is a Helen MacInness spy novel without the spies. Her romantic and political philosophies are just as plain as ever, but there is no thriller plot to drive them. This puts the spotlight on the romantic plot -- which is just fine. The book is a little more integrated and subtle than "Rest And Be Thankful", making it my favorite of her non-thrillers. (As a point of comparison, my favorite of all her books is "The Double Image".)In case you want to know the plot, it's about two young college students falling in love in the years just before World War 2. We follow them from infatuation to a more mature relationship, seeing them learn from the problems they encounter along the way.WW2 looms in the background, but the book ends about a year before the war actually starts.