Edwardian England Voices Add Up to All Talk, Little Truth

Last year, Tracy Chevalier made something of a splash with her novel “Girl With a Pearl Earring.” Set in 17th century Holland, it presented the world of the Dutch painter Vermeer from the vantage point of the mysterious girl who served as the model for the eponymous picture. Now, in “Falling Angels,” the American-born, London-based writer focuses her attention on Edwardian England in the first decade of the 20th century.

The novel begins intriguingly, if a bit showily, with a moment that seems to owe more than a little to an episode in the television series “Upstairs, Downstairs”: “I woke this morning with a stranger in my bed. The head of blond hair beside me was decidedly not my husband’s. I did not know whether to be shocked or amused. Well, I thought, here’s a novel way to begin the new century.” The voice, one of several we will hear, belongs to Kitty Coleman, a bright, vaguely dissatisfied woman who longs for something beyond the conventional, but who is dismayed that her husband has mistaken the louche, upper-class custom of wife-swapping for something truly fresh and meaningful.

Rather than probe more deeply into the character of Kitty Coleman--or the custom of wife-swapping, for that matter--Chevalier assembles a collage of voices. In the course of this novel we hear from Kitty’s husband, Richard; the Colemans’ daughter, Maude; Richard’s imperious, strait-laced mother, Edith; their cook and their maid; their next-door neighbors of a slightly lower social class, Alfred and Gertrude Waterhouse; the Waterhouses’ daughters, Lavinia and Ivy May; and some people who work at a nearby cemetery. If Kitty Coleman is rather “advanced,” her neighbor Gertrude Waterhouse is pious and conventional. The two women regard each other warily, but their husbands share a liking for cricket, and their daughters, Maude and Lavinia, become friends even though the girls are actually as ill-matched as their mothers. Maude is plain but thoughtful and bright; Lavinia is pretty, self-centered and vain. The girls meet when they are 5; the novel ends when they are 14.

Perhaps in the misguided belief that she is thereby endowing her story with the weight of cultural history, Chevalier uses the cemetery as the focus of the book. Improbably and heavy-handedly, she has the two families, Colemans and Waterhouses, first meet at the cemetery where they have gone to mourn the death of Queen Victoria, the passing of an era and all that. The Waterhouses, being less socially exalted than the Colemans, have adorned one of their graves with an angel, which the Colemans find tacky and sentimental. Ignoring their parents’ prejudices, the 5-year-old girls, Maude and Lavinia, become friendly with each other and with Simon, a sharp-eyed little boy their age who is the son of one of the gravediggers. Later, Kitty Coleman likes to take the girls on excursions to the cemetery, where she enjoys her interesting talks with Mr. Jackson, the intelligent man who runs it. Much information is included regarding Victorian customs of mourning: Kitty, not surprisingly, is impatient with all the fuss; Gertrude Waterhouse is concerned with showing respect for the dead; and spoiled little Lavinia simply relishes any excuse for display.

Much of the novel has a forced quality. Already at the outset, the characters sound suspiciously like mouthpieces: “I don’t dare tell anyone or I will be accused of treason, but I was terribly excited to hear the Queen is dead,” declares Kitty at the dawn of the new century. “The dullness I have felt since New Year’s vanished, and I had to work very hard to appear appropriately sober.” In the nine years that follow, Chevalier puts Kitty through the paces: a love affair, her first orgasm, an unwanted pregnancy, an abortion and a sudden, head-over-heels passion for the women’s suffrage movement. All this, without giving the reader much insight into the interior workings of Kitty’s mind and heart. And if the novel fails to provide much sense of psychological depth, it is equally unsatisfying as an evocation of period. Chevalier has a tin ear when it comes to language: a character uses “spit” instead of “spat” as the past tense, while another uses “he” for “him.” Nor does it seem likely that an English person in 1904 would refer to a “patio.” And since when would a British person say New Year’s, an Americanism if ever there was one?

What first promises to be a fascinating exploration of complex individuals unfolding against the backdrop of a transitional era soon seems more like a collection of figures strutting onto the page to announce who they are and what they are supposed to represent. We are left with an ungainly collection of shopworn truisms delivered in voices that don’t ring true.