Catherine Hillery, a middle-aged widow and author of several well-respected biographies, is hired to write an authorised biography of deceased politician Neil Campion. While she is intrigued at the prospect (she met Neil once years before during her youth), she is also a tiny bit curious as to why she was selected by the Campion family as the author.

Catherine soon embarks on the biographer's journey of information-gathering on her subject, and she immediately runs into trouble. After weeks of researching, she finds that she is more confused about her subject than before she started. Just who is the "real" Neil Campion--a minor politician with little claim to fame--or a pro-Nazi sympathiser who hatched a plot to overthrow the British government?

In several instances in the novel, Colegate explores the nature of truth by entering the minds of her characters and revealing how they perceive and often misinterpret other's actions. This is achieved with pure brilliance in a scene between Catherine and Madden--a Jewish tabloid journalist who brings not only his theories but also his bruised pride and envy of the upper classes to his relationship with the Campion family and to his professional rivalry with Catherine.

Catherine's relationships with her two sons (and 2 daughters-in-law) are portrayed with refreshing honesty, and Colegate manages to flesh out even minor characters skillfully and efficiently. In a six-sentence paragraph, Colegate describes Etta, Catherine's daughter-in-law as a attractive Italian whose "combination of weak will and strong persona exerted a magnetism over both men and women," and by the end of the paragraph, the reader has Etta's essence in a nutshell.

The internal structure of the story is simply remarkable, and Colegate illustrates her phenomenal talent in this excellently crafted book that packs an amazing amount into a mere 200 pages. As Catherine Hillery tries to define the truth surrounding Neil Campion, Colegate forces the reader to examine the complex system of values that motivate us all, and one is left with the question of the feasibility of presenting a single version of 'the truth' given the erosion of time.

With her usual precision, Colegate here focuses on "deceits of time," those deliberate little falsehoods that all of us, over time, create and eventually accept as truth because they allow us to smooth over unpleasant events in our lives and assuage any guilt we may have about them. In creating personal deceits, we adjust our pasts--our personal histories--so that they are more palatable and easier to cope with. Ultimately, most of us try to convince others to accept these little falsehoods as the truth. Colegate, a writer of the utmost exactitude, wants the whole truth laid bare, and in this remarkable novel she requires each of her characters to face reality in order to come to new understandings.

Catherine Hillery, a widow in her fifties, is hired by a solicitor for the Campion family to write the definitive biography of Neil Campion, a young Member of Parliament, a World War II pilot, and a man with an idealistic vision of what society could become. Neil died in 1941 in a car crash on his way north toward Scotland, his reasons for that trip unknown, and Catherine is not sure why she, rather than someone more famous, has been chosen to write his biography. Determined to find out the truth about her subject and not merely reflect what the family wants her to say, she intends to get all the facts. As we come to understand Neil's family--his brother and sister, his wife, and his grandson--we also become acquainted with Catherine, her two sons, and their wives. All, including Catherine, are hiding from some truth.

As is characteristic of Colegate, this novel is a marvel of compression, with individual scenes casting light on Neil Campion, one or more of his relatives, and Catherine, all at the same time. Colegate's sparkling dialogue conveys attitude, class, prejudices, and personality, while also revealing plot and the deceits each character insists on maintaining. Parallels among characters and between the Campion family and Catherine expand the scope and give added power to the message, and the irony which occurs at the end is both darkly humorous and memorable. Colegate is a powerful writer, sadly neglected, and this novel deserves a wide audience. Fortunately, many copies of this book are available on Used venues, including Amazon.

There are some times that can be mistaken for no other times. And later we look back on those times through the mist and embue them with a magic which seems to have disappeared from our lives.

That last summer, that one perfect evening before the dawn of the war to end all wars was such a time. After the war, after the trenches, after it was all over, things were changed forever. The war swept away a generation of youth. And it swept away the life of the leisurely aristocracy. The world got busier, and louder. But for one perfect moment...

The Shooting Party gathers together representatives from every generation and every class onto a large country estate for a shooting party which takes place on the eve of that great war. We see the hints of war and because we are looking back, we understand how fragile this time is and how soon it will end. The slaughter of the hunt resonates with the slaughter shortly to take place. And when one character (in the words of his wife) "overreaches" himself, the card house begins to tumble and we know that that time and place is gone forever

The people in this book come in three layers. We are mostly concerned about the top layer, including Sir Randolph Nettleby and his 1'000 acre estate, Lord Lilburn and his wife Olivia, Sir Ruben Hergesheimer, Count Tibor Rakassyi of Hungary, and so many, many more. They set the tone.

The lowest layer are the beaters for the shoot. They are farmers from the village. They are anonymous, and nobody talks to them. They are just the background noise. The exception is Tom Harker, occasional poacher.

In between those two layers are those who bow to the top and kick those below. For instance Glass, the head game keeper, and his son Dan. Or the maid Ellen.

And also somewhere in between is Cornelius Cardew. part preacher, compleat vegetarian, and convinced socialist. He seems too lightweight for an oracle, so his contribution to this novel is not quite clear.

But to come to the book: Mrs. Colegate has assembled a very large cast that fits into the Edwardian age. She gives us detailed biographies of each cast member and thus makes clear that they are not all the same. Mainly, some of the wives have their own private amusement with men not their husbands. Olivia holds hands with Lionel Stephens, while Arline Hartlip flirts with Charles Farquhar. Cicely, granddaughter of Minnie Nettleby, reaches for Count Rakassyi, but is still too young to do damage. Her brother Osbert meanders through the story with his pet duck. As we go along, the characters take on their own, distinct personality. Lionel Stephens rates the shoot as a competition. That is decidedly uncivilized, and Gilbert Hartlip hates him for it. The picture of this society fills in as we read along.

It has been said that the book describes the end of an era. I cannot find much indication of that. Also, everybody knew in October of 1913 that a major war was imminent, but this is not reflected. I believe it is too easy to use our knowledge of today to read something into that day before the Great War. Let us be honest and admit that the landed gentry is still with us, that they still have their shoots, and that their influence can still be felt. The more things change, the more they stay the same - as Voltaire said.

Nevertheless, it is an elegant and worthwhile book.

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Scheduled for reprinting in December, 2002, this novel will thrill readers who admire careful, precise writing. Like a jeweler, Colegate has polished her prose till it sparkles, avoiding pretension, excess verbiage, and empty lyricism, choosing, instead, words full of inference and irony, feeling and attitude. Broad themes, historical perspective, and a plot which contains a large cast of individualized characters from all levels of society come alive here in a mere two hundred pages.

Setting the novel in the autumn of 1913, before the outbreak of World War I, Colegate establishes her themes in the first paragraph, asking the reader to imagine an Edwardian drawing room of a country estate, with gas lamps, a log fire, and people from a long time ago, sitting and standing in groups. In the room beyond, a "fierce electric light" shines forth, overpowering the quiet, lamplit room, making it seem shadowy and the people like "beings from a much remoter past." The gentry in this snapshot are not naïve. Even they recognize that "an age, perhaps a civilization, is coming to an end," as industrialization and urbanization are changing the centers of power, and a war looms.

A lively cast of characters is invited to Sir Randolph Nettleby's 1000-acre park for a weekend shoot, and as they converse and interact, they quickly become individualized, the reader learning of their attitudes and prejudices, their understanding of the code of behavior, and the details of their very "civilized" lives. When the shoot begins and the beaters send the birds into the air, the symbolic parallels between the world as it has been, the world as it will be during the coming war, and the world as it may be after the war become obvious to the reader, and the death of one of the characters is not a surprise.

Colegate is never polemical, however, imbuing her story with a great deal of personal interaction, warmth, and feeling, and as the action unfolds, the reader feels simultaneously wistful about the loss of cultural identity which is about to occur and gratified that the stultifying "predictable-ness" of that life will change. This is a book to savor, written by a remarkable stylist whose prose clearly illustrates that less is more.

"Winter Journey" by Isabel Colegate is the story of a brother and sister who are both in late middle-age. Alfred, a photographer, leads a solitary--one might think lonely life--at the old family home in the country. His sister. Edith, in complete contrast, has had a very full life--two marriages (and divorces), children, and a successful political career. Edith and Alfred, are in many ways, complete opposites. They share an odd sort of relationship. Edith periodically visits Alfred, but they avoid personal discussions, and so when the novel begins Edith and Alfred have an amicable relationship, but they have grown apart over the years, and one would hardly describe their relationship as close.

Edith is the sort of person who is ready to create the next phase in her life, and Alfred, of course, has always contented himself with letting life just happen. Their lives collide when Edith hatches a hare-brained scheme which requires Alfred's consent. Wounds that were created decades before are opened-- regrets erupt, and a rather uncomfortable state of affairs exists.

This is my third Colegate novel, and it won't be my last. Colegate captured the uniqueness of the brother-sister relationship perfectly well with her ordered prose. This is a quiet, gentle novel which moves rather slowly to its poignant ending. Edith and Albert--the main characters in the novel--are ordinary, believable siblings who share a past, and parents but remain two unique individuals who often do not understand each other. I think the brother/sister relationship is perhaps one of the most difficult to understand--and hence extremely difficult to portray in any sort of sensible fashion within the confines of a novel. I wasn't wild about the novel, and no doubt this shows with my lack of enthusiasm. The main fault I had with the novel was that none of the characters really grabbed my interest, or my imagination, but it was enjoyable, nonetheless--displacedhuman

Alfred, 60, lives quietly in the English countryside. His sister Edith, 62, comes from London to visit him and to actively take charge of Alfred's life, of his neighbors and his property. The story circles around past husbands, wives and lovers, each shown in sharply etched profile. How do they interact with each other? Fairly well on the surface, being ever so polite and forgiving to each other. The fight goes on underground.

The author does a marvellous job of language and description. The landscape is absolutely still, frozen in winter. The people glide along effortless. But then they step on a landmine and quickly their stories blow up in their faces - just to remind us that there are deep secrets in dark corners.

Anyone who has ever questioned whether less is more in terms of writing excellence will find the question answered completely in this impeccable, precise novel. With a care for the exact word which one usually finds only in short stories, Colegate's Winter Journey tells of a brother and sister in the winter of their lives, rejoining each other at the family farm in rural England, and finding that the memories which surface lead each on a personal journey toward new understandings. Every word counts here, and as the lives of Edith and Alfred unfold and their relationships with past lovers, acquaintances, and each other become clear, a picture of their completely different lifestyles and attitudes emerges.

This is not an action novel, in terms of plot. Most of the excitement here is generated by the unfolding of events from the past, the revelations of which Colegate delays through carefully dropped "hints" and prolongs, tantalizingly, throughout the novel. A couple of subplots involving present efforts to change the farm and affect its future, provide a context for these revelations and an impetus for the interior journeys of Edith and Alfred. Those who think that great writing needs long, lush, descriptive passages, complicated syntax, and convoluted dialogue will find Colegate a refreshing change. Her scenes and images are of such startling clarity and simplicity that she creates whole worlds in just two hundred pages here. With her jewel-like precision, she speaks directly to the heart and makes Edith and Alfred live.

Dreadful boring book by someone who clearly has no knowledge of silence and aloneness.

This is an example of a book with interesting subject matter, which just doesn't work out in terms of readability. Colegate is a fiction writer otherwise, and her writing style does not jive well with a topic that requires research and independent insight. Here we have what is essentially a scrapbook of vignettes about hermits, recluses, and a few misanthropes throughout history who decided to live the solitary life. The problem is that the book is merely a repetitive listing of stories, usually covered in a few pages, distilled from other books in which an entire volume is given over to those persons. See the bibliography for proof. This list-like method is also evident in the way Colegate has fallen for the predictable legends of Thoreau as a secluded loner on Walden Pond (chapter 13). Of course Thoreau's writings on naturalist ethics deserve to be classics, but Colegate misses this point as she describes Thoreau as a hardcore hermit in a vast wilderness. Everybody knows that Thoreau was actually within short walking distance of a town and often went to his mother's house for food and shelter, and was hardly a wildman roughing it on his own.

Colegate's writing style is also pure British, in that rambling, non-committal, and vaguely chauvinistic way. Colegate covers many interesting regions of the world in this book, but that creeping British condescension seeps through. For example, in chapter 2 she gives a predictable save-the-rainforest argument to people in Thailand who are forced to rely on firewood for fuel, and apparently need this Western person to teach them about forest ecology. Ultimately, this book is just a listing of untroubled loners, who are interesting in themselves, but are compiled into a boring book that has no insights or researched conclusions about humanity's need for solitude in itself.

The author roves over many examples of solitary life, touching all too briefly on variants from the isolated spiritual hermit to the modern eccentric recluse. There is little evidence of in depth study of the life, rather a broadsheet offering glimpses on anyone who seems to have sought to live apart, for whatever reason.
If you are searching for a better understanding of what the solitary or silent life is, look elsewhere.

"The Summer of the Royal Visit" by Isabel Colegate is primarily an historical novel centering around Queen Victoria's visit to Bath. Colegate does an excellent job smoothly blending the impact of the royal visit into the everyday lives of her characters.

Part of the novel is narrated by a lonely retired school teacher/historian in the present day as he relates the story of the events leading up to the Queen's visit to Bath. The novel centres on a group of characters--mainly upper-class residents of Bath--the Moores, the Tranmers, and the Hanburys. Other characters are Stephen Collingwood--the widower curate who is rapidly losing his faith in the dreariness of Haul-Down (the slum of Bath), Madame Sofia--a mysterious European emigree who may possess clairvoyant powers, Peter Tilsley, an impoverished young poet who will never discover what little talent he really has, and Casper Freeling--the sociopathic wanderer who styles himself as a scholar, and whose visit to Bath--under the guise of 'research,' involves some rather nasty activities.

I found it difficult to really become interested in any of the characters. The most interesting character was the retired school-teacher whose brief appearances throughout the novel are enough to tantalize--but not enough to satisfy. Most of the other characters--the Tranmers, the Moores, and the Hanburys were largely undeveloped. Casper Freeling was nicely developed and suitably wicked, and Colegate's description of his mental processes were quite brilliant. However, the tale itself just wasn't enough to either interest me or satisfy me.

The biggest negatives to this novel, however, are the very ones that most historical novels commit (and this is why I generally avoid them like the plague). The author simply cannot help bringing in topics that may be relevant today, but scream at the reader as an offence as they are out of context. And here they are:

1.The local clergyman, Stephen Collingwood, lectures a local woman about her "monthly cycles" which supposedly contribute to her emotional instability. Would a Victorian clergyman know about such things? Would he discuss them with a parishioner?

2.A placard-toting demonstration against animals used for fur or feathers. PLEASE!!!! This is Victorian England. Mothers were totting up their babies' bottles with gin, and horses were flogged until they died in the streets. Animals used for fur coats and birds killed for feathers were not social issues at the time.

Colegate's writing style is smooth and adept. The characters sold this story short by simply failing to hold my interest. I know I really love a book when I regret its ending, but I had no regrets as I turned the last page of this novel.