Reviews for A Force of Habit

The average rating for A Force of Habit based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-11-18 00:00:00 Mark Mcgough The author did a good job in characterization.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-08-31 00:00:00 Nicholas Logan The Introduction to this book explains that it is really a compilation of short pieces originally published in The Times over the period 1937-1939. Jan Struther was asked to contribute a series imagining the life of an “ordinary” woman, although her definition of “ordinary” was doubtless a reflection of her own background. Mrs Miniver has both a town and a country house, with servants in both. Her eldest boy is at Eton, and every August she motors up to Scotland for the grouse-shooting season (or should that be “grice-shooting”?) In other words, she lives a lifestyle that was representative of a tiny minority in 1930s Britain. I will grant that Struther was writing for The Times, which would have had a readership heavily skewed towards the middle and upper classes, and who may not therefore, have been aware of just how unrepresentative Mrs Miniver’s circumstances were. For the first third or so of this book Mrs M potters about harmlessly with shopping and attending dinner parties, her adventures laced with gentle humour – so gentle in fact, that you don’t always notice it’s there. About 60 pages into the book there’s a sudden change of tone when she and her family go to collect their gas masks. This was in relation to the Munich crisis of September 1938, when war looked on the cards but was postponed for a year when Britain and France ended up giving Hitler what he wanted. Mrs Miniver explains the conflict to her two older children because she is determined that, if war comes; “…these children would at least know that we were fighting against an idea, and not against a nation.” On the whole I enjoyed the book. Mrs M has a pragmatic approach to life and a positive “do something” mentality. I can see why the character was used as the basis for a wartime film intended as a morale-booster. Jan Struther was quite a sharp observer. The book ends at Christmas 1939, so it covers the start of the war, but not events like Dunkirk or the Blitz. Because the various segments were written across a period starting from 1937, you get a sense of how the coming war gradually affected people’s thinking. It’s a decent read, even if we doubt quite how “ordinary” Mrs Miniver actually was.