It takes chutzpah to tackle a national treasure as jealously loved and gatekept as Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. Purists greeted last year’s television adaptation much as cat-owners might welcome a partially eviscerated mouse. I avoided watching, because the Wes Andersonification of my greatest literary succour seemed likely to burst every vein in my eyeballs. Can India Knight pull it off?
The bones remain intact. Beautiful, guileless aristocrat Linda Radlett falls disastrously in love with a rich banker and then a broke radical before finding happiness with an urbane Frenchman. But plot was never really the point. The delight is in the details.
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Knight’s are bang on, and there’s joy in spotting them. The Radlett family become rock royalty, exiled in deepest Norfolk. Only two bars of signal in an abandoned pig ark connect the home-schooled siblings and the narrator, cousin Franny (no longer Fanny, understandably), to the outside world.
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