THE OPPORTUNITY OF A LIFETIME

by Emma Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1980

We were all desperate, divided from each other, against each other, were as people trapped . . . ."" So remembers 55-year-old Nora Scobie, ""a dead branch of the Scobie tree,"" as she begins her exploration of ten days in the summer of 1937. With her pretty, hate-racked sister Cynthia, and their sniping, caste-obsessed parents, Helen and Bernard, 15-year-old Nora arrives at the then near-pristine coast of Treath Bay. Due to lack of vacation money--a maddening barrier to the privileged social status Helen and Bernard pursue in such singleminded desperation--the Scobies have allowed the muddled, kindly, elderly Tills-Mitson sisters to offer them the use of the Rose CafÉ, a summer ""cream tea"" business, temporarily discontinued because of a Tills-Mitson illness. Bernard and Helen snap and snarl in their unfashionable digs, lording it over docile maid Beatrice (unpaid for her ""holiday""), and sneering at the family of gaunt ex-fisherman Willis, a gassed war vet who seems to have the ""unsuitable"" regard of the Tills-Mitsons. While Cynthia, nursing rage, coolly plans an escape via an affair (plus stealing and pawning her mother's brooch), Nora gladly flees to the beauty of the seacoast and befriends Terry, a boy on the run after imprisonment for petty thievery in London: the two create an Eden apart from adult castes and cant. And meanwhile Bernard and Helen elatedly make plans with boyish Peter Miller, a greedy and amoral local hotel manager whose social graces ""transformed them into the people they always believed they were."" Together Miller and the Scobies plan to buy out the Tills-Mitsons to begin a resort complex; and their grinding advance sets off spidery, violent vibrations--old feuds, loyalties, and grievances erupt. Destruction follows, two lives are lost, and years later Nora muses on Willis' offspring (one of whom is now facing down Miller, who conquered the coast) and their renewing spirit. Smith (Maidens' Trip, The Far Cry) has returned with a sad, splendid novel that--like William Trevor's work, though more muted--keenly probes the large postures of petty, small-framed lives.

Pub Date: July 11, 1980

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1980

Categories: FICTION