The Mighty and Their Fall by Ivy Compton-Burnett – #1961Club

My final 1961 Club read is by an author I’ve loved for years, and the most divisive writer out there – Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett. For those not in the know, her novels are told almost entirely in dialogue. That dialogue is very eccentric and unrealistic, and people will spend pages arguing about small points of grammar before something of seismic importance happens in an aside. The main story in The Mighty and Their Fall is the (possible) second marriage of Ninian Middleton. After the death of his first wife, he lives with his mother Selina, his adoptive brother Hugo, his various children and their governness Miss Starkie. Like almost all of Compton-Burnett’s novels, this one is set in a vague late-Victorian period in a large, upper-class house – and the inhabitants of it seem to live in uneasy harmony, where anyone might turn on anyone else at any moment. And will do so in the most elastic language. There is a distinctive Compton-Burnett dialogue style, which relies upon syllogisms…