This is the story of a couple, a Mr and Mrs Ransome, who find their sedate and predictable lives disrupted by a completely unexpected event. They go to the opera one evening and they come back home to find that they have been robbed, or so Mrs Ransome says.
“Burgled,” Mr Ransome says, because people are robbed and homes are burgled, and being a lawyer, he likes to be precise.
But neither of them is quite right, because burglars pick and choose, they don’t take everything. And whoever it was, took every last thing, including the drapes and the carpets. They took the casserole that was being kept warm in the oven…they even took the toilet paper rolls from the bathrooms.
At one go, the Ransomes lose everything. How does one cope with a situation like that?
The Ransomes are a wealthy, middle-aged couple who are set in their ways, and are perhaps a little bored of each other, and the endless routine of their lives. The burglary (for lack of a better word) shakes them up. All of their stuff is insured, so it’s not the shock of financial loss, it is the shock of losing all the things that they’ve built their lives around, even the things that they’ve never really used.
They begin to shop for a few necessary items while waiting for the insurance money, and Mrs Ransome finds herself shopping in the local Indian store instead of the high street and discovering a lot of interesting things at her doorstep that she’d never thought to explore before. As the days go on, she begins to find the loss of all her possessions strangely freeing.
Mr Ransome has one great love in his life and that is Mozart. He likes to listen to Mozart every evening. He bemoans the loss of his sound system until he realises that he can now buy a new, more state-of-the-art system. So, in their own way, they both come to terms with this extraordinary situation.
But losing all their stuff makes them rethink their lives a little bit, particularly Mrs Ransome who begins to realise that she’s been living in a box all these years, confined by stuff. She finds herself wanting to change her life, do something different with it.
As the novel goes on, Bennett explores the relationship between the couple and the rut that it’s stuck in, and he brings to light all the little lies that they’ve been telling themselves and each other for years.
This book tackles a bunch of important themes, like our unfortunate tendency to define ourselves by the things we own, keeping up appearances, doing and saying things that are expected of us, and settling for a life that weāre only vaguely content to exist in, because itās too much trouble to rock the boat.
The writing is funny, and itās thoughtful and poignant. Alan Bennett brings to this book the unique blend of gentleness and irony that is so characteristic of him. This is a novella, running into just over a hundred pages. It packs a lot into those pages. This is a good read.
between the pages 