Reading The Matchmaker (1950, set just after WWII) is like sitting by a fire-side on a wintry day – it’s beautiful to see the flames and the shadows they cast, it’s warm and comfortable, overlaid with a sense of smugness that one is indoors rather than battling the elements, but occasionally there’s a shower of sparks that wakes you from your indolence and makes you remember that fire can be dangerous, and occasionally it’s just too hot and soporific and you find yourself drifting off with eyes itchy from the smoke.
It’s just after the Second World War in a Britain of rationing and deprivation. Alda’s husband is stationed in Germany, and she’s living in the Sussex country-side in a small cottage with her three children, her few neighbours decent enough people but eccentric to varying degrees. The farmer living down the road has a tightly wound wife, two home-sick Italian prisoners of war working on his land, and then is assigned a Land Girl named Sylvia who dreams of being an actress and dyes her hair. Of these simple enough characters Gibbons builds a story that mostly enchants and occasionally irritates, lit with occasionally acidic but mostly empathetic insight into human nature and appreciation of landscape. Alda is the titular matchmaker, secure in her thirteen-year marriage with a comfortable sense of being able to manage grown-ups (with the best of intentions) as well as she does her children (who are given their own characters rather than relegated to scenery). Yet people somehow manage slip beyond her plans and forge their own destinies – a grand term, perhaps, for the small sphere of love and country-matters and farm-work that The Matchmaker revolves around, but the characters’ choices matter to themselves and therefore to the reader. Well, me.
The few mis-steps, I think, that The Matchmaker takes (and I’m assuming the novel in general will appeal to people who like English novels set in the country-side which proceed at a leisurely pace) are in the frequency of its descriptions of nature in bloom or in shadow, as seasonally appropriate, and in the descriptions of the deep soulful link some characters have with the earth – Gibbons veers perilously close to the sort of thing she satirises so brilliantly in Cold Comfort Farm at times. Her treatment of class and nationality, as well as her assignation of traits such as melancholy or artistic sensitivity to heredity, can also seem somewhat stereotypical to the modern reader. While Gibbons shows a decided preference for middle-class upwards, she does compare the aristocracy to highly-bred dogs at some point. The Italians are peasants driven by emotion rather than intellect and the Land Girl is working-class and has a confused notion of socialism, for instance, while one character’s lover is well-bred but fickle and brittle.
It must be remembered that the novel was written six decades ago, however, and there is much to enjoy in its warmth and humour, as well as the poignancy that pervades some scenes of remembering and confusion.
See my blog entry for a quotation from the novel.
Gibbons, Stella. The Matchmaker. London: Vintage Classics, 2011. (1950).
Cannonball Read V 
Great review, and really appreciated the comparison to Cold Comfort Farm (as you can tell from my handle, I’m a fan of the latter). The passages she marked with stars as her “best” in CCF were, in my opinion, some of the silliest. I couldn’t really tell whether it was intentional but I could tell that it was funny.
Thanks for commenting! I’ve noticed your username and it always makes me think of woodsheds… : ) I think the passages starred in CCF were definitely intended to be silly, parodying D.H. Lawrence and so on. In The Matchmaker the descriptions of nature are more lucid, and some passages are lovely, I just felt that a few were unintentionally overwrought.