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The Play Room (1969)

par Olivia Manning

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4 sur 4
The title and the cover - and of course the name of the author - made this look very promising: a coming of age story set in an English seaside town in the swinging sixties.

Laura was fifteen, and she dreamed of leaving home for the bright lights of London. She wanted to leave her dull, lower middle class family behind. Her strict mother, her unassuming father, her irksome younger brother.

But that was in the future. What she wanted right now was to be friends with Vicky Logan. She was lovely, the cherished daughter of liberal, well to do parents, and she had once shown Laura a small kindness that Laura had never forgotten.

It felt a little predictable, a little stereotypical, but the two girls offered an interesting study in contrasts.

Vicky had every advantage, but she lacked a certain spark and had no interest in the world outside her hometown; Laura had fewer advantages, but she was bright and she was ready to fly.

So who really had most advantages?

Laura’s mother accepted an invitation for her children to spend the Easter holidays with an old acquaintance on the Isle of Wight. It had been one of those invitations made out of politeness with no expectation of it ever being accepted. And so Laura and her brother, Tom, found themselves with bed and board, but otherwise left to their own devices.

On one fateful day Laura and Tom stumbled into a private estate. They didn’t mean to trespass, but the incoming tide had caught them unawares. The strange ‘Mrs Toplady’ invites them into ‘her’ home and shows them the play room, full of naked, anatomically correct adult dolls, twisted into suggestive poses. Laura and Tom run.

It was strange, and nicely under-explained, but it didn’t quite work.

Because it came out of nowhere, and because there were no consequences.

But it gave Laura a wonderful story that would draw her into Vicky’s circle.

Vicky, much more sophisticated than Laura, understands more about the play room than Laura, and she is intrigued.

Laura falls into the role of best friend when Vicky’s friend Gilda is away on an extended family holiday. The pair go to parish dances, and then to more grown up dances with workers from the local factory.

Laura is captivated by the atmosphere and the music, and Vicky is captivated by a rough factory worker. She is out of her depth, as manipulated as one of the dolls in the play room, and the summer will not end happily.

The story was compelling, there were some nice moments, but I am afraid that this book just did not work.

So much of the dialogue, so many of the things that happened, just didn’t quite ring true.

And I was left wondering what Patricia Highsmith or Barbara Vine would have made of ‘Mrs Toplady’; there was, I think, the potential for a more interesting story in this material.

Olivia Manning is the author of many wonderful novels, and I am disappointed to have to say that ‘The Play Room’ is not one of them. ( )
  BeyondEdenRock | Mar 21, 2018 |
i could identify a lot with laura and the time but the ending was just too much. ( )
  mahallett | May 24, 2015 |
Today's paedophiles are yesterday's perverts and dirty men; men, mostly, who would lure innocent children and confront them with sexuality at a time and in a way they are not ready. The young teenagers, who befell that lot, were usually straying, consciously or unconsciously looking for such experience, and shocked or just blunted when they blundered into a situation like that. I would agree with the contention that today's paedophiles are a lot more dangerous, but that is beyond the scope of this review.

Such a blundering search into the world of sexuality lies at the heart of this novel by Olivia Manning. A young girl, merely 15, stumbles through teenage friendship, through a weird encounter with a pervert into a sexual relationship, for which she is not ready.

Unfortunately, the story does not ring true, and is hardly worth reading. ( )
  edwinbcn | Oct 3, 2011 |
The heroine of The Play Room is a naive fifteen year old girl who has two goals in life. She wants to run away to London where all the Carnaby Street action is and she wants to be best friends with Vicki Logan, the richest and most beautiful girl in her school. Her life would be perfect if she and Vicki could have a small London flat and work in a fashionable boutique. She hates her mother, is disappointed in her father, and is jealous of her brother. Teen-age angst drips from every page.

The title comes from an incident which occurs when Laura and her younger brother Tom are on vacation on the Isle of Wight. She has managed the vacation by accepting one of those polite Christmas card invitations to visit a woman who had worked with her mother years earlier. Mrs Button, not very pleased to have young guests, makes it clear that they have a bed to sleep in and the rest of the time they are on their own. To escape a rising tide one day, they are forced to scramble up a cliff and trespass onto a private estate. There they are confronted by "Mrs Toplady", a transvestite who lures the children to a playhouse which contains anatomically correct adult dolls in suggestive poses. Although Tom and Laura run away, Laura does not seem to grasp the significance of the posed figures or the fact that Mrs. Toplady is a pervert.

Back home, Vicki Logan's very special friend has to spend the summer out of the country and this gives Laura the opening she needs to become close to Vicki. Vicki is only tolerant of Laura until Laura tells her the story of the play room. Vicki, beautiful and lazy as a Siamese cat, realizes what Laura has seen and becomes terribly excited by it. But then Vicki is a small-town sophisticate in an implied sexual relationship with her Malta-bound girlfriend. Over the course of the summer Vicki condescends to have Laura in her company. They start out by going to the parish dances which are dull affairs. They then switch to very different dances in a factory union hall. Laura is swept away by rock and roll and Vicki picks up an abusive admirer.

According to the Virago introduction, Manning wrote this book after she completed her Balkans Trilogy. She wanted to do something different and thought a book about teen-agers could be adapted and made into a movie. The Play Room proves that even a good writer should stick to what she knows. She didn't get it and it shows in the novel. She uses just about every cliche she can think of. Laura's mother doesn't understand her and is a demanding nag who prefers her brother. Her father is a lovable failure. Her brother appears in the beginning of the book, dropped, and trotted out in the last few pages. Vicki is too beautiful, too rich, and has an adoring mother and handsome father who is somewhat of a rake.

I read this and thought that Manning hadn't been around too many 15 year olds. Nothing rang true, from the over-the-top description of rock music to the cute slang to the fascination with the Stanley Kowalski-ish factory worker. The story is all over the place with themes introduced and dropped. (Vicki's father gives Laura a passionate kiss apparently because she is wearing a gold plastic dress and falsies. What the heck???)

Manning missed. ( )
  Liz1564 | Aug 8, 2010 |
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Nom de l'auteurRôleType d'auteurŒuvre ?Statut
Olivia Manningauteur principaltoutes les éditionscalculé
English, IsobelIntroductionauteur secondairequelques éditionsconfirmé

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To Jane and Jonathan
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Gilda Hooper, wedged with her Best Friend into a small front desk, was comparing the boys of Camperlea.
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Published in America as The Camperlea Girls.
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