Lissa Evans, Small Bomb at Dimperley (Doubleday, 2024)

 In this new novel from Lissa Evans there are elements of the comic romance plots of Jane Austen (note the nod towards Pemberley in its title) and the inheritance/marry-for-money storylines in Trollope’s fiction, also set among the rural landed gentry.

In Small Bomb there’s a difference: radical social change is in the wind as WWII has come to an end. The dowager Lady Irene Vere-Thisset of Dimperley Manor clings to the old, privileged morals and attitudes of previous centuries, while dreading the storming of the estate by red revolutionaries (which she assumes is the next logical development now the people have elected a Labour government).

As her recently demobbed son Valentine returns to the country estate he’s inherited on the death in action of his older brother, he faces the prospect of having to sell the house and/or land to pay off debts. It’s all very well being lord of the manor, but the gutters are leaking, the drive is full of potholes, the gardens are overgrown, nearly all the servants have gone, and the family are having to economise everywhere: the glamour days are over for people of this class and in this dire financial situation.

Lady Irene’s solution for their money problems is to marry off Valentine to an eligible heiress (there’s the Trollope plot). Meanwhile he needs to find an alternative plan in order to keep the estate intact. Not because he shares his mother’s values about duty and status, but because his younger brother, who was left cognitively impaired by a ‘brain fever’ in childhood, wouldn’t be able to bear such change.

Darker features like this give this deftly crafted light comedy a satisfying gravitas. Another is the fact that Valentine’s dyslexia, not recognised at that time, causes him to feel inadequate and lacking in confidence. He was underrated first at school, where he was bullied and labelled ‘thickie Thissen’, and then in the army, where he knew he’d never cut it as an officer because he knew he wouldn’t manage the paperwork required, so had enrolled in the ranks.

Once back at Dimperley this condition renders him unable to challenge the gloomy forecast in the paperwork he’s provided with by the family solicitors when he seeks legal advice on how to save the estate.

He clearly needs help, and it comes from an unexpected person in the household. I can’t say more without spoilers. As in Crooked Heart and Old Baggage, Evans mixes highly entertaining plots and colourful, well-rounded characters with a pungent critique of the class system. It’s never po-faced or earnest, however, and there are some delightful comic touches.

Many of these involve the two feisty teenaged daughters of Valentine’s widowed sister-in-law, Barbara. They’d been evacuees in America for most of the war, and there they’d picked up libertarian attitudes that clash with the stuffy, outmoded ways of Dimperley when they return home. When one of them is given a puppy, she ‘wanted to name him White Fang, but Mummy thought it might give the wrong impression.’

Like Valentine, Barbara is a disappointment to scary Lady Irene – who’s a termagant with more than a whiff of Lady Catherine de Burgh about her. To Lady Irene, what Barbara

…never seemed to understand was that, as a member of a titled family, one was forever on display. Each undignified appearance, each informality of speech, each pair of slacks was a piece chipped from the plinth on which the family stood. Without elevation, there was no respect; without respect, there was nothing to stop Mrs Featherstone, Deputy Head of the Preserves Committee, from loudly calling, ‘Come on, Lady I, join the fun!’ from the conga line at the Wendover Victory Celebrations, a line in which Barbara could be seen clutching the waist of the post-mistress, while being herself clung to by a man who sold horse drench from a van.

Also like Valentine, Barbara has to learn to stand up for herself and defy the Lady Irenes of that world.

As in the two previous novels by Lissa Evans that I’ve read, she is centrally interested in the role and perception of women, the way they are often dismissed or undervalued in the patriarchal society of early-to-mid-20C England, and how strong, indomitable individuals overcame these prejudices and negative attitudes to achieve autonomy. A resourceful working-class woman shows herself more adept at surviving and adapting in this changing world than the gentry who’ve inherited their place and status without possessing any of the qualities needed to sustain them.

Links below to my posts on those two previous Lissa Evans novels I’ve read:

 Old Baggage (published 2018)

 Crooked Heart (2014)

My thanks to the publishers for providing a proof copy of this novel.