Finishing Touch by Brigid Brophy

Finishing Touch Reviews

• 
  Hugh

  Having enjoyed Brophy's
  The Snow Ball earlier this year, I couldn't resist picking this one up when I saw it in the library. This one is more farcical in tone but still very enjoyable - it gained a new readership when it was revealed that its central character, the finishing school headmistress Antonia Mount, was inspired by Anthony Blunt.
  
  The plot is frothy and the characters are all caricatures, but the linguistic dexterity and playfulness made it great fun to read, though readers will need to know a little French to get the most out of it.
• 
  Tom Hurst

  With a plot like a highbrow Carry On film, this short novel, first published in 1963, combines campy sex-comedy farce with recherché lesbian and gay references and a disorienting style peppered with French vocabulary (I kept a translation app to hand).
  
  Delicate, manipulative, self-absorbed Antonia and her long-suffering, downtrodden partner Hetty run a fancy but somewhat questionable ladies’ finishing school, which is shaken up by the arrival of “royalty”. Will this change lead to honour and success?
  
  Antonia is a fairly monstrous creation and the source of much of the comedy. Her affectations, snobbery and obsessions are woven into the telling, in a strange mix of third and first person. I found it quite a quick read despite the obscure style.
• 
  Tom Leland

  It is rare and only with self-loathing that I don't finish a book.
  It is in some ways unfair for me to give this a 1 -- but I feel there's more
  value in one giving their honest appraisal of how a book affected them
  than in giving a rating based on how they think they should've been affected,
  or while knowing full well that another sensibility might find it wonderful.
  
  I could hardly make heads or tails of this. Would help a bit to speak French,
  though I doubt it would've changed my rating.
• 
  Sara G

  Ah, obnoxious. I found the reading experience incredibly annoying. But I know a lot of people who would love it, and I can't really fault this little story its overbearing pretentiousness on the account of my own personal distaste for it.
• 
  Joyce

  just a little too slender and slight, without the propulsive force of artistic will of firbank at his best
• 
  Ygraine

  do i Get camp modernism ? no. am i therefore at all likely to really Get what brophy is doing here ? probably not. but i had fun w all the sugary, sticky, overripe Slime-Slickness of this.
• 
  Grada (BoekenTrol)

  From one of the book boxes that Moem sent to me. This one looks too interesting to let go without reading. So, I'll host it on my shelf for a while.