Long. So be prepared. The copy I read was 640 pages.
The story fills those pages, though, and it was great to have a book to settle into in the evenings, knowing that I’d be carried along but with more to look forward to tomorrow.
The Good Companions was an enormous best-seller in England when it was published in 1929. It’s the story of a “concert party” or pierrot troupe, which was a variety traveling entertainment company, very popular and common between the wars.
It takes a bit — about a third of the book — before we meet that troupe, named the “Dinky Doos” at that point. No, before that, we are immersed in the stories of three very different people whose paths will cross with each other, and eventually with the performers, changing their lives in the way chance encounters at the end of winding paths do.
Jesiah Oakroyd is a Yorkshire worker — a mechanic of some sort with a challenging family life and a hankering for the road. Fear that he’s being accused of a crime and the actual reality of being fired from his job inspire him to set out and see what he can see.
Elizabeth Trant is a woman in her mid-30’s who has spent her adult life caring for her recently deceased father. We meet her as the estate is being auctioned off and she senses the opportunity for change. This potential change is moved along by a visit from her nephew Hilary (whose accounts of his intellectual set — the “Statics” — is priceless), who leaves her his car.
Finally, there’s Inigo Jollifant, a young man with literary aspirations and musical talent who teaches in possibly the worst public school in England. After offending the wife of the headmaster one too many times, he, too, sets off late one night, determined to experience The Road and write something Literary about it.
These three experience various adventures, misfortunes and accidents that bring them all to the same place, which happens to be the same place that the members of the Dinky Doos are sadly gathered, having been abandoned and financially wiped out by their former manager.
Originally published in Medium, by Amy Welborn
Originally published in Medium, by Amy Welborn
