Book Review: The Darling Buds of May

Title: The Darling Buds of May

Author: H.E. Bates

Date: 1958

Publisher: Curtis / Atlantic Monthly

ISBN: none

Length: 219 pages

Quote: “After distributing the eight ice creams—they were the largest vanilla, chocolate and raspberry super-bumpers, each in yellow, brown and almost purple stripes—Pop Larkin climbed up into the cab of the gentian-blue, home-painted thirty-hundredweight truck, laughing happily. ‘Perfick wevver!’”

It was often claimed in the 1950s that British Humour was too obscure and topical to be funny in other countries. The Darling Buds of May appears to be an example. I think the gross-outs grossly outweigh the laughs, but this is not a novel in which characters develop; it’s a rather violent satire on the changes in the British class system after the war. The Larkins don’t have to be tacky in a funny way. The mere idea of these tacky people emerging from the London slums to earn and spend obscene amounts of money, in tacky ways, is the joke.

There’s a plot, sort of. Mariette, the eldest of the six Larkin children, reports that she’s going to have a baby and has no idea who the father might be. This may just possibly be a trick, because an attractive young man, Sidney Charlton, tax collector, is in the neighborhood…and sure enough, he’s due to call on the Larkins, who never pay any taxes. The Larkins are migrant laborers, but they’re well paid. The landed gentry among whom they work are impoverished by having to pay income and property taxes, while the Larkins are paid cash every day, keep no records, spend their money as fast as they get it, and think their life is “perfick” if people just “use [their] loaf” (head) and live irresponsibly from day to day. The landed gentry might resent Pop Larkin enough to turn him in if he weren’t constantly treating them to party foods, cocktails, and in some cases illicit erotic thrills that their “background” would not allow them to get for themselves. Charlton is supposed to gather evidence for the prosecution of Pop Larkin, but instead he lets the Larkins seduce him into their lifestyle of carnality.

If you were one of the people who resented people like Larkin it’s probably terribly, caustically funny. If you think the blame belongs to the Welfare State for not allowing the gentry their chance to teach Larkin about the benefits of temperance, it’s sort of funny, too; I chortled. If you like the kind of escape fiction where everybody has fun and nobody gets badly hurt, you might enjoy The Darling Buds of May. If you believe that fictional sinners ought to be punished, you won’t like this novel at all…in fact I acquired it because a censorious library-goer in North Carolina hated it enough to damage my copy. Let’s just say that the Larkins, father and daughter, get off much, much easier than moralists would say they deserve.