Peter

Fiction ~ novel
Published 4th March 1922
(First read 27/01/2015)

As I said in my recent post on Limitations (1896), no matter how bad the E F Benson novel, and no matter how bad my ~ or other folk's ~ reviews might make them sound, I can almost always find something good to say about them, and do generally enjoy them, even if only masochistically.  They may have ropey or downright idiotic plots, be stuffed with loathable cardboard-cutout characters, feature reams of guff about Art or Music or Ancient Greece, contain dodgy, clumsy writing, or a mixture of these, but there's usually some redeeming feature.  Limitations was the exception to this rule¹; Peter isn't.
Yes the plot's hackneyed ~ even EFB has done it before, in [I can't for the life of me remember which one ... it's the one where the spare wheel smoothes everything over for the hero and heroine by walking off a cliff] ~ 'poor' boy marries rich girl; other girl threatens to ruin everything; all turns out well in the end.  Yes the heroine is your stereotypical Bensonian 'saint'.  Yes the whole thing lacks any kind of drive or tension.  [in progress]


¹ Scarlet and Hyssop came extremely close.