There is also a serious commentary on the acute differences between the well-to-do people of Peyton Place and the ‘shack-dwellers’ on the outskirts of town.
The characters are wonderfully brought to life – I felt that I was really going on a journey with them. We are let into the lives of children who are discovering sex and also adults who rediscover a passion that they thought they had lost. Over the course of nearly 500 pages, she weaves an elaborate story of lives tortured by past mistakes, and present-day crimes of the home. “If I’m a lousy writer, then an awful lot of people have lousy taste,”
I can’t help but love Metalious even more after reading in a Wikipedia article that she is reported to have said It is sensational and shocking – I was surprised at just how shocking – however it is also beautifully written, emotive and clever. But to focus only on the sensationalist angle of this book sells it short. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay.”Īnd even some of the books advertised in the back of this copy sound like totally (probably fabulous) trashy bodice-rippers of novels. The first lines of the book hint at drama As their intimate lives are revealed, this facade is peeled away to reveal some of the nastiest aspects of human behaviour.įrom the cover of my rather well thumbed copy (below), I could have been forgiven for thinking Peyton Place was pulp fiction. It seems an idyllic sort of place with an orderly main street and a host of respectable-seeming residents.
Peyton Place is a fictional New England town ‘book-ended’ by two churches of different Christan denominations. It was also made into a film not long after the book was published in 1957 which I need to get my hands on! I think it must be a generational thing, because although I had never heard of it,my Dad mentioned that there was a TV series of the same name which was popular in the 1960’s. Peyton Place (although recently re-printed with this lovely cover by Virago Books), was actually published way back in 1956. I would never have even thought of reading this book if it hadn’t been for Simon of Savidge Reads, who having heard great things about it, suggested we read it together for a bit of a rogue book read while on our woodland weekend away.
0 kommentar(er)
