The Feast by Margaret Kennedy

Faber & Faber, 1950 & 2021

Why?

I found this in a charity shop (Hospice in the Weald in Edenbridge) and was immediately intrigued. Despite having gone quite far down the rabbit hole of forgotten mid-twentieth century female novelists, I'd never heard of Margaret Kennedy - who I've since learnt was best known for her novel The Constant Nymph, which opened as a West End play starring Noel Coward and Edna Best in 1926.

I was also interested in Faber's decision to reissue this during the pandemic, in 2021.

Enjoyment factor

This is a real gem. The premise of a hotel buried under a landslide isn't immediately encouraging, but despite the odds and without me committing a plot spoiler, the novel has an pleasingly redemptive ending.

It's set in 1947, and Kennedy constructs a cast of characters spanning a range of ages and backgrounds, through whose interactions she explores the politics and zeitgeist immediately after the war. The tone is light and the plotting is impeccable.

It left me thinking ...

Hotels in the late nineteenth and early-mid twentieth century present the perfect set-up to explore interactions between strangers who are thrown together by circumstance. The Hotel by Elizabeth Bowen (1927), Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum (1929) and Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner (1984) are obvious examples, and one could throw A Room with a View in here too.

The conceit stopped working with the advent of mass tourism, the evolution of self-catering, and the practice of going out to restaurants for lunch and dinner on holiday rather than signing up for full board. Although I'm not sure that I'd want to spend every meal of my holiday with the same group of strangers, it does feel that something has been lost.**

The stage setting of the hotel is particularly apt for exploring the issues of the day, as (within the bounds of a certain class) a good generational and professional cross-section is generally represented. Being on holiday and affording of leisure, they are also conveniently bored, and so have plenty of time to converse, argue, and fall in and out of love.

All of which goes to make The Feast a perfect encapsulation of the mood of the nation after the war, with the additional factor of who the author chooses to bury in the landslide, and who she chooses to go on to prosper in the new world.

** White Lotus ...?