I have skimmed the comments above, and agree with many of them. So I will just jump in and address something no one else has.
One of the first notes I made about the book was in reference to the casual homophobia of the time. Vita comments about the gay Magnus:
Quote:
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"I'd be in the way, of course, and would make myself scarce. But he'd probably like to keep the boys."
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This is the sort of thinking that has dogged gay men for decades - that they are interested in young boys, etc., etc. However, doing a bit of research, I discovered that it's likely this was a subtle dig at the opinion of homosexuality, not homosexuality itself. According to an article in the
Belfast Telegraph from 2017, Daphne du Maurier's older sister was gay and it is alleged that du Maurier herself was bisexual. "Later in life, there were rumours of trysts with other women, including the wife of her American publisher, though this was unrequited. She did, in the late-Forties, have an affair with an actress and, most intriguingly, her father's former girlfriend, Gertrude Lawrence." It seems to me now that by putting the hateful words into the equally hateful figure of Vita, she was magnifying Vita's ugliness, not edifying her opinion.
Which does lead me to my next point - wow, did I hate Vita. She was the sort of grasping, materialistic, alcoholic (though everyone in the book seemed to be to some extent) American in every bad sense of the word. It was very easy to see how Dick could prefer a psychedelic drug to his own wife, though it was hard to imagine why he had married her in the first place.
The second thing I wrote down was how much like Connie Willis'
Doomsday Book this felt to me. Mind you, I know that Willis' book involved a woman actually having to live through the Black Death and that real time travel was involved. But the sense of attachment to these other people and times felt similar to me. The comparison is a compliment to both tales.