Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

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This novel of an older man living a quiet life in an English village is precisely what you would expect. The gently evolving plot, the village characters that range from an admirable stuffiness to a comic bossiness, the simple, lyric language, the way the relationships progress through quotidian yet pivotal crises, all are predictable with an exactitude that should have made the novel boring and unrewarding.

But the fine line between cookie cutter and classic is drawn with conscientiousness and talent. The author is working within a well-defined tradition---the cozy---but she executes it beautifully.  There is cleverness in the way she builds up the reader's admiration for the old-fashioned values and manners of the protagonist and then lets you (and him) glimpse a slightly ungenerous side to him that he has spent a lifetime trying to deny. Characters come on stage as one-dimensional and are slowly revealed to be more. Symbols and themes are artfully employed: a set of hunting guns passed down from a father, the importance of nature, the joy of spending one's day with a kindred soul, the blessing of company.

I'm not sure how much longer the cozy will serve authors. Even here, it strains belief that the Major thinks a "stern letter to the planning officer" will result in "the entire matter being resolved in an amicable manner between reasonable men"---when the matter at hand is a multimillion-dollar development deal. The type of reserve and adherence to tradition that's required to make the cozy work literarily will soon be anachronistic to even the oldest generations. But it's nice to see that, for now, it can still yield a novel as rewarding as this one.
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