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Elizabeth Jane Howard’s beloved family saga the Cazalet Chronicles spans three decades in the life of the upper-middle-class Cazalet family. The first four books, written in the 1990s, run from a bucolic prewar 1937 to a bruising 1947, while the fifth, 2013’s All Change, skips ahead, sitting lonely in 1956. The books are exquisite doll’s houses of feeling and object: both period detail and eternal emotion are rendered precisely and vigorously in Howard’s lovely prose. “Panoramic, expansive, intriguing as social history and generous in their storytelling,” Hilary Mantel wrote in the Guardian. The enormous cast of characters – four late-Victorian siblings, their parents, their children and partners and ex-partners and servants and friends and lovers and enemies and cars and houses – sprawl deliciously over the years. The family fortunes rise and fall. Marriages fail; deaths occur; babies are born; people fall in love. Things change; things stay the same.
Written a decade after the death of the original author, The Golden Hours by Louisa Young adds a sixth to this quintet. As with all Cazalet novels, to describe the plot would be impossible: it is simply that many people, whom we have come to love over the course of the previous novels, live their lives, now in the early 1960s.
Polly, first encountered as a serious and beautiful child almost 30 years earlier, is now the chatelaine of a falling-down country house. This house has replaced the original Home Place as the centre of family life: it’s Christmas, and the siblings gather at Polly’s home. The next generation take up much of the narrative, picking up the loose threads that Howard set down: what will Louise do with her life? Can Clary and Zoe and Rupert and Archie really all live together in one house? And what, for the love of God, is going to happen to Neville?
There is little more controversial, to the serious reader, than a so-called “continuation novel”: a sequel written by somebody else, with little or no input from the original creator (who is mostly, in such cases, beyond the grave). Can it be done? Should it be done? Can creations continue to live without their creators? Mortality need not present a challenge to those readers who wish for more (or publishers who wish for more of their money). Eoin Colfer was given the keys to the Hitchhiker’s Guide; Sophie Hannah became Poirot’s posthumous puppeteer. Sebastian Faulks, an overachiever, has been both Bond and Jeeves. Young has two significant advantages: first, this is her 16th book; second, Howard was Young’s own personal beloved “Aunt Jane”. There is something pleasing about a family saga being continued by the author’s own family – but the stakes are, perhaps, even higher.
Happily, however, Young’s gamble has paid off: The Golden Hours is a total delight. It is not the flawless The Light Years, but it is not remotely out of place in the series. It takes a couple of chapters to settle fully into Howard’s voice, but achieves a startling mimicry that drew even this sceptical reader along for the ride. Young tackles several of the trickier problems posed by Howard – Neville again! – without shying away from her frank clarity into the human mind. If the dialogue is occasionally a little more contrived than Howard’s, and a few of the forays into big-picture thinking verge on the glib (“the problem wasn’t what you were, it was how people treated you for what you were”), then these things can be forgiven for the sheer pleasure of coming home.
And if things are different, well, then things are different. Any series written over 23 years will trace not just the ways the characters change, but the ways the writer changed in the writing. There is, perhaps, a greater gulf between The Light Years and Howard’s final novel All Change than between All Change and The Golden Hours; or even between The Light Years and The Golden Hours.
Writers change, as indeed people change; and yet humanity stays the same. And this is, in many ways, the great unifying theme of this book and the series as a whole. “Are things exactly the same, or mortally different?” muses one-time chauffeur Tonbridge. Another character quotes the Oracle at Delphi: “Know Thyself on one end; Things Change on the other …”
And this, perhaps, is the secret to writing a great continuation – or, in fact, the secret to writing anything. Things change; know thyself. Young understands both. A new generation takes up the mantle of the next generation of Cazalets: with a seventh and eighth volume promised, long may it continue.
