Good Behaviour: A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick – Booker Prize Gems (Virago Modern Classics)

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I only enjoy reading stories, real or fictional, about characters who raise themselves and raise me with them.

They made up for this shortcoming with an unquestioned loyalty to the empire and a cult of the stiff upper lip.

Nothing is ever brought above the level of what is decent, not a flinching emotion not a tear not a raised voice. Sex (and there is a lot of it), masturbation, pregnancy, murder, suicide – none of it is named, so that reading the book is rather like reading a detective story, in which clues have to be picked up and decoded, or a murder mystery (lots of people die in questionable circumstances), which you have to interpret backwards while you are reading forwards.

and young adulthood, during which bosomy Aroon’s physical being is at odds with the aesthetic of the 1920s but she allows herself to have hopes of her brother’s friend, Richard. The women do away with themselves, or they go to England ‘for six or eight months’ to do away with the baby, by abortion or adoption.

While, as though in duty bound, Papa was hunting, fishing and shooting in their proper seasons, at Temple Alice money poured quietly away. Sometimes she allowed herself to read him her favourite pieces from The Children’s Golden Treasury of Verse, when they would charge with the Light Brigade, or even lean from the gold bar of heaven with the Blessed Damozel.

This climax right at the end allows perhaps our only observance of a natural reaction, and our focus on this I think allowed CR and myself into the tragedy of Aroon's character. But crumbling codes of conduct cannot hope to save the members of the St Charles family from their own unruly and inadmissible desires.In The Rising Tide (1937), when Cynthia’s husband is killed at the Front she pours her grief and desire into hunting and then into a series of increasingly desperate affairs.

In case we miss the analogy, he even brokers sex on one occasion by offering a thoroughbred horse to the twins. Rather, she enlarges the novel’s reach into a wider culture of secrets and silences, of doing it but not saying it. Behind the gates of Temple Alice, the aristocratic Anglo-Irish St Charles family sinks into a state of decaying grace. I smiled, and hummed, and stood carelessly as the hall emptied into the ballroom and I waited, only for Uncle Ulick. She longed for affection from her chilly, withdrawn mother, a celebrated poet of sentimental verse, but struggled to embody her Victorian ideals of modesty and composure.

But they are on the way to Shannon Airport, where they will collect a young American visitor with whom Jane is destined to fall in love. Another Anglo-Irish family whose members are dedicated to mutual assured destruction, even as they slide into genteel poverty. There’s a battle between the generations, a shadow cast by the First World War, financial difficulties and a persistent worry about inheritance.