South Riding by Winifred Holtby

I used to wonder why so much English fiction (of all sorts, not only books but movies, shows, songs, etc) set in the north is inevitably about poverty, misery, and hopelessness, until I spent three days in the north of England and have no further questions. The weather is horrible, the poverty levels are still appalling, most shops seem to be in the process of shutting, the streets are terrible and ill-lit, and technology is constantly malfunctioning. This book is very good, but it reminded me extremely vividly of the 90s show Our Friends in the North (which launched the careers of Christopher Eccleson and Daniel Craig), a very good but supremely depressing show about love, poverty, working class struggles, and all the usual. Many parts of this book gave me a headache because they deal so much with local government (something I will never understand) and corruption, which feels like it might have been written in 80s rather than the 30s. I loved the characters in it, which was what kept me reading it, and the vivid and elegant style. Unfortunately, Holtby gave an unnecessarily large fraction of characters names that start with an 'H' (Hicks, Huggins, Hubbard, Holly), and since when I read I tend to take in the first letter of a name and the rest at a glance, I got hopelessly confused in all the 'H's and kept forgetting whose wife was dying, and who was the groom in the country house. Though I dislike books about local government, this one did an excellent job of delicately constructing and displaying the interplay between personal relationships, wishes and desires, and politics. The one thing I did not like was that much of the book is spent building sympathy for Robert Carne, a country 'gentleman' whose entire estate is disintegrating as he struggles against economic difficulties and has been ruined by his wish to give his aristocratic wife everything she desires. Before the action of the book starts, he, in a 'moment of passion' (or whatever), commits marital rape, which results in his wife's pregnancy, and feels bad about it for the whole book. I just could not stand reading about how he has such high morals and is unjustly treated, all I could think was that he deserved everything horrible that happened to him and worse for acting that way towards his wife. I'm not sure why on earth Holtby seems to justify marital rape, but it really put me off and upset me. Having a complex characters is one thing, but I just can't accept anything good about a character like that, and was disgusted by all the other characters who look up to him like some sort of tragic martyr to progress.