Good Behaviour

In the run up to the 1981 Booker Prize, shortlisted author Molly Keane was asked to keep a diary by the Irish magazine, Image. In it, she documented the parties, companions, food, drink and outfits that were part of her experience as a shortlistee in the weeks before the winner ceremony.

Novelist Diana Athill was an editor before becoming a full-time writer. Among the authors whose books she published was Molly Keane (pictured in France with John Gielgud in the 1930s). In a piece for the Guardian from 2017, Athill recounted how she pulled rank over another editor so she could edit Keane’s Good Behaviour. ‘What had moved me to such bad behaviour was not only the novel’s quality, it was also the extent to which I shared Molly’s background,’ recalled Athill. Read the full piece, which includes Athill’s memories of attending the Booker Prize dinner with Keane in 1981, at the Guardian.

‘Keane’s publisher of nearly fifty years rejected it, saying it was too nasty and suggesting she write at least one “nice” character. She refused. It sat in a drawer for years until her friend the actor Peggy Ashcroft read it during a visit and urged Keane to try again. Published to instant acclaim in 1981, it was nominated for the Booker Prize but lost to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. She was nearly eighty years old. It was her first book published under her real name.’

‘Molly​ Keane’s gloriously camp novel, Good Behaviour, begins with the narrator, Aroon St Charles, a 57-year-old survivor of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, murdering her aged mother with a rabbit mousse. She doesn’t choke on it: Aroon has made sure that the quenelle in cream sauce is perfect, with ‘just a hint of bay leaf and black pepper, not a breath of the rabbit foundation’, the mousse irreproachable ‘after it has been forced through a fine sieve and whizzed for ten minutes in a Moulinex blender’. It’s the smell that kills her.’

BBC Two’s book show has returned, featuring Booker-longlisted books as part of the Big Jubilee Read