‘I want to live like music sounds,’ she had said once, coming out of a concert at the Musikverein. [p. 12]
Reread, though I don't think I've read this since the last millennium, and (as usual) I recalled only the broad outlines of the plot.
Ruth Berger grows up in 1920s and 1930s Vienna, the adored only child of a university professor and his elegant wife. She falls in love with music at an early age, and subsequently with her cousin Heini, a gifted (though egotistical) pianist. Her idyllic childhood is terminated by the Nazi Anschluss in 1938: Heini is in Budapest and Ruth's parents en route to London, but Ruth finds herself alone in occupied Vienna due to an unfortunate mix-up with visas.
Luckily there is a white knight at hand: a friend of the family, paleontologist Quin Somerville, who offers Ruth a marriage of convenience so that she can escape Vienna on his passport, and be reunited with her family. Of course the marriage will be dissolved as soon as Ruth is safe...It is probably not a spoiler to say that, like so many 'convenient marriages' in fiction, this marriage is not dissolved, despite several major miscommunications and the competing charms of Heini (for Ruth) and the sleek, ambitious Verena Plackett (for Quin, who is oblivious).
The charm of The Morning Gift is less about the romantic element than the characters and their situations. Ruth is an extrovert, amiable and sociable and fascinated by people, the kind of girl who knows someone's hopes and fears and secret joys an hour after meeting them. She's educated, intelligent and passionate about the natural world, whether the physiology she studies at university (how unfortunate that Quin is one of her lecturers) or the glories of the landscape surrounding Quin's ancestral home on the Northumberland coast. Her parents and her uncle and aunt, accustomed to the refined and cultured life of the Viennese upper middle classes, are adjusting slowly to life as refugees in their squalid Belsize Park lodgings, frequenting the Willow Tea Rooms where Ruth ends up working. Each of the older generation has a plot-thread of his or her own, from Uncle Mishak's radishes to Quin's snobbish aunt. There's a real sense of community among the dispossessed immigrants, and I believe it's based on Eva Ibbotson's own experiences.
A cheerful, comfortable, amusing read, with just enough drama and (temporary) despair to keep the plot moving, and plenty of personable individuals with their own sub-plots. Beauty, kindness and compassion triumph, despite the looming horrors of the imminent war. Ibbotson described her romantic novels as being written 'for intelligent women with the flu': I think they're a pleasing distraction against many ills.
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