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Christmas Pudding by Nancy Mitford

Our festive book of the month for December was Christmas Pudding by Nancy Mitford. Set around a Christmas party at a posh house in the 1920s countryside, it was a mere 180 pages long, had a beautiful cover and couldn't have a more festive name if it tried. It looked like a cracker!

 "The formidable fox-hunter Lady Bobbin is holding a Christmas house party. Attendees include her rebellious daughter Philadelphia, a pompous suitor, a couple of children poring over newspaper death notices, and a dejected writer whose first serious novel has been declared the funniest book of the year. Add to the mix beautiful ex-courtesan Amabelle Fortescue and her guests staying in a neighbouring cottage and you have a ribald tale of true love and false fidelity, hijinks and low morals, not to mention the consumption of a considerable quantity of Christmas spirit."

 Where’s the pudding?

We almost universally didn't like this book with our major complaint being the lack of anything remotely Christmas in it. In fact it wasn’t until page 100 that the words ‘Christmas pudding’ were even mentioned. The cynics amongst us felt Mitford only went for this title merely so she could sell more books, the less cynical just felt miss-sold.

Now a bit of googling may have been carried out before the meeting to reveal the party that took place in the book was meant to represent the Christmas pudding - you put a load of mismatched ingredients (people) together and get a wonderful pudding (party) as a result.

Where’s the party?

This would have been good except the party was a similar non event. The blurb makes reference to a it, yet (like After the Party) when it eventually happened it didn't really amount to much. This was similar to the whole book really, the love story between Paul and Philadelphia disappointed (was Philadelphia a lesbian?) the humour didn't quite cut it and despite being brief in length we all found it slow to read. It was a bit…boring and left us decidedly un-festive. We gave it a 3.55 out of ten with someone even giving it a 0 (a book club first). "It was just a stupid book*"

*In the interests of fairness I do have to point out that one of us totally loved it and awarded it an 8. Our book club is clearly like a Christmas pudding - lots of different ingredients coming together to make a wonderful group - Merry Christmas you lot xx


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