- This is another triumph for Melbourne author Steven Carroll. It's the fourth and final novel in his superb T.S.Eliot series, the first three being The Lost Wife (2009), A World of Other People (2023), and A New England Affair (2017). I've read and loved them all.
- The novels are not semi-biographies of the great English-American poet as much as stories of close friends, lovers and associates, many quite incidental. In Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight Eliot's first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, is centre stage.
- As usual it's beautifully written in delicate, rhythmic prose. It's a sensitive portrayal of Vivienne who Eliot subsequently divorced. The marriage was fraught from the beginning. She had a wild side and became deadened by the boredom of the marriage to an unresponsive, conservative, complex Eliot. She believed her creative contribution to his success was unacknowledged. She became mentally ill and was sent to a ‘lunatic asylum’ where she died many years later in 1949.
- Carroll changes her story to enrich the narrative. He has her escaping the asylum in 1940 with the help of friends and going undercover for 30 days. Under English law at the time, if escapees from the institution were able to stay free and care for themselves for that length of time, a judge could declare them sane and permanently set them free.
- He also introduces other characters that are highly likeable and engaging: a police sergeant (Stephen Minter) and the receptionist at Faber’s office (Brigid Delaney) where Eliot worked as the senior editor. They end up becoming attracted to each other.
- The policeman has been given the task of finding Vivienne. He is the son of Austrian jews who emigrated to England before the war and who've been interred. He re-reads Eliot and is not attracted to him or his poetry at all. He finds him cold and arrogant, and his poetry classist and openly antisemitic.
- The ending is very satisfying. The novel is a delightful read.
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