Elizabeth Goudge and Maggie O’Farrell

As with previous A Book A Day in May challenges, sometimes I’m doubling up on days – and in the past two days I have finished a 407pp book (The Heart of the Family by Elizabeth Goudge) and a 484pp book (This Must Be The Place by Maggie O’Farrell). Before you think I am some sort of reading superhero, I should tell you that I had read most of both of them already. One of the bonuses of having lots of books on the go at once is that it lines up quite a few candidates for this May challenge. Anyway, some quick thoughts about the two books in turn…

The Heart of the Family: Book Three of The Eliot Chronicles

The Heart of the Family (1953) by Elizabeth Goudge

The Heart of the Family is the third in the trilogy about the Eliot family. The first, The Bird in the Tree, was one of my favourite reads last year – I loved the family dynamics, the warmth and clarity with which Goudge wrote about them, and the no-longer-fashionable theme of self-sacrifice. I went onto read the second in the trilogy (though didn’t get around to blogging about it), and really enjoyed that one too – people often single out The Herb of Grace (also published as Pilgrim’s Inn) as their favourite in the series. I can see why, as I loved the theme of setting up a new home, but I missed Lucilla – the matriarch who rather fades into the background.

In the third of the trilogy, Lucilla is somehow still with us – well into her 90s, a little less dominant over her family’s decisions, and in a period of reflecting back on her life and all its triumphs and sorrows. David, the young man with youthful naivety and fervour in The Bird in the Tree, is now an older family man, less impetuous and emotional but still making strained decisions. He has also been successful in his career as an actor, and it has brought him a secretary – Sebastian Weber is the most significant new character in this book. Sebastian intensely dislikes David – and his arrival at the family home challenges both of their views of each other.

But this is truly an ensemble piece. We have grown to know and love (or at least understand) such a wide cast of characters, and it is a poignant pleasure to see more of them. I found myself more drawn, this time, to Margaret and Hillary – two of Lucilla’s children whom she has not loved with extravagant affection of other children and grandchildren, but who are such solid people that I couldn’t help empathising with them intensely.

As before, there is Goudge’s mix of serious Christian spirituality and wry humour. It’s such a pleasure to read a novelist who takes faith seriously, and she is also often great fun. I loved this bit…

For Meg’s religious ideas at this time had been formed more by Mrs. Wilkes than by her mother, and Mrs. Wilkes leaned more to the Old Testament than the New. Sally told Meg shyly and beautifully about the Baby in the manger and the lambs carried in the arms of the Good Shepherd, and Meg listened courteously but was not as yet very deeply impressed, but Mrs. Wilkes’s dramatic accounts of the adventures of the Old Testament heroes sent her trembling to her bed and were quite unforgettable.

“And up to ‘eaven ‘e went,” Mrs. Wilkes would say of Elijah, “with such a clanging and a banging of that fiery chariot that you could’ave ‘eard it from ‘ere to Radford. And all the angels shouted, ducks, and all the archangels blew their trumpets till the sky split right across to let ‘im in. Like a thunderstorm it was, ducks. Somethink awful.”

So, yes, I enjoyed The Heart of the Family – but I did find it very much the worst of the trilogy. The characters were delightful to re-encounter because of my fondness for the family, but the pace and momentum was a bit lacking. It’s a long novel to more or less meander, and there is some hard-to-pin-down quality missing in this book that was there in the other two. It was good, but for some reason it felt a bit like a faint shadow of the other two.

This Must Be The Place (2016) by Maggie O’Farrell

And talking of faint shadows… I won’t bury the lede this time. I really enjoyed this long novel but, again, it’s not as good as the others I’ve read by O’Farrell. I think this is my sixth book by O’Farrell and it’s my least favourite – excellent writing and fascinating characters, but something is missing in the momentum here too. (Sidenote: this beautiful cover was hiding behind the dustjacket.)

It’s too complex a novel for me to cover everything going on – but the gist is that Claudette went missing. She is a world-famous French actor and director who disappeared one day. By the time it became clear that she’d faked her own death, she was away – people knew she was alive, and presumed she was a recluse. In actual fact, she had ended up married to Daniel, an American academic who studies speech development.

Daniel has previously been married to another woman. He has also broken off a previous relationship with a woman who was later found dead. There are children from different stages of his life, some of which he is estranged from.

In typical O’Farrell fashion, we dart all over the place – many, many different relationships and different time periods, from the 1940s to the 2010s. Sometimes we are in America and sometimes in Ireland. A lot of the story has to be pieced together, bit by bit, as more and more is revealed. I’ve described some of it in linear fashion, but that absolutely isn’t how the novel is presented.

I can cope with a bit of jumping around if there is something to keep us hooked. I thought she did it brilliantly in Instructions for a Heatwave, for example. And I did enjoy This Must Be The Place – her writing and characterisation are superb. But I wasn’t really sure what the reason for reading was. In other books of hers, there has been one or more central questions that we want answered. In This Must Be The Place, I wasn’t really sure what that was. It’s in many ways an excellent novel, but I got to the end unsure quite why she’d written it.

As I say, the writing is beautiful, so I want to end with a section that I noted – this is 1940s, with Daniel as a very young man:

Daniel looked at the man. The man looked at him. In later years, he will recollect only dimly the trip he and his mother took on the ferry. He will recall it as a series of sensations: a sock that kept slipping and wrinkling under his heel, the startling white undersides of gulls as they wheeled above him, a girl throwing pizza crust up into the air for them, the amber beads of rust on the rails. And this: the unaccountable sight of his mother sitting with a man who was not his father, her skirt with the sailboat print arranged around her, the man turning toward her and whispering words that Daniel knew were unsettling words, persuasive words, frightening words, her head bowed, as if in prayer.

So perhaps I was a little disappointed by both these books, while also thinking them rather good. It’s a case of expectations being very high, and quite hard to express justly in a quick review! I’m glad to have read them.

Two books about heatwaves

During the recent heat wave in the UK (and elsewhere, but I experienced it in the UK) I decided to get two relevant novels off my shelves – Penelope Lively’s Heat Wave and Maggie O’Farrell’s Instructions for a Heatwave. Partly because it amused me, I’ll admit. And partly because it would feel odd to read a novel about a heatwave in any other temperature – though there is a good argument for doing it in midwinter, to warm myself up. It was also interesting to see how the two writers treated heatwaves differently – beyond Lively treating heat wave as two words, and O’Farrell using heatwave as one…

Heat Wave by Penelope Lively

Let’s start with Lively’s novel – or perhaps novella, coming in around 180 pages. Published in 1996, she doesn’t give a specific date for the heatwave in question, though it seems contemporary. It opens with Lively’s characteristically detailed, observant writing:

It is an afternoon in early May. Pauline is looking out of the window of her study at World’s End. She looks not at the rich green of the field sweeping up to the cool blue of the sky, but at Teresa, who stands outside the cottages with Luke astride her hip, staring up the track towards the road. Pauline sees Teresa with double vision. She sees her daughter, who is holding her own son and waiting for the arrival of her husband. But she sees also an archetypal figure: a girl with a baby, a woman with a child. There is a whole freight of reference there, thinks Pauline. The girl, the child, the sweep of the cornfield, the long furrowed lines of the rough track reaching away to elsewhere.

When I think of Lively, I think of fine writing – though I also think I’d struggle to identify her writing if I saw a group of examples. Perhaps it is that lack of a writerly idiolect that makes her a very good, but not a great, writer? Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself – let’s talk about what Heat Wave is about. Pauline is a middle-aged copyeditor (not, she is keen to note, an editor), separated from her husband and living for a summer in a cottage adjoining her daughter Teresa, Teresa’s husband Maurice and their baby Luke. None of them are permanent residents of this isolated rural pair of houses – but Pauline is living there for the summer, and has invited Teresa and family to take the larger cottage next to hers. Both seem quite small, and there is a claustrophobia to this proximity of family that is both feared and longed for.

The novel is about the experiences of this stifling summer, but also looks back to earlier stages of their life – of Pauline’s motherhood, of her unsuccessful marriage, of the stages of infidelity that led to the separation. The novel is third person, but Pauline’s own recollections do a good job of combining the close-up and the far away. She is both live-r and observer of her life. This is described in one memory, where she tried to burn a manuscript:

Each time she revisits this scene it becomes like a Dutch interior. She sees it with interested detachment: the quiet room across which lies a wedge of sunlight from the open door, beyond which can be seen the pram in the garden, in which a baby sleeps, the young woman who stoops before the fireplace, doing something with paper and matches.

Pauline is an exceptionally good character, and I suspect one with whom Lively has a good deal of empathy. She is intelligent and has moments of being determined and forceful. But these are anomalies in a life that is often passive – passive for fear of alienating her daughter, for fear of saying the wrong thing, for fear that she might indeed be wrong. Lively has built a strikingly complete and layered heroine. The other characters are perhaps not quite so layered, but neither are they flimsy. And this book is much more about people than plot. There are dramatic incidents, but mostly it feels calm and gradual, the long, hazy summer spreading itself wider than the 180 pages.

And the heat? Something I’ve learned from reading these two novels together is that it’s very hard to sustain the feeling that a story takes place in intense heat – because, after all, you can hardly have characters constantly saying “Gosh, I’m hot.” Or, rather, you can, but it would be terribly tedious. So in both novels I didn’t feel the continual oppression of a heatwave, but I liked how Lively threaded it through with occasional paragraphs describing the environment – often the fields behind the cottages, recognising the way the countryside is both romantically beautiful and dispassionately practical.

There is a day of such sledgehammer heat that no one ventures outside. And something curious happens to the wheat. It seems to hiss. Pauline keeps all her windows open, and through them comes this sound, as of some furtively restless surrounding sea.

As I said earlier, I think there is something, for me, that keeps Lively from being a truly great novel. Perhaps it’s that her style is not wholly distinct; perhaps it is simply that the 1990s is far from my favourite period for literature. But I only mention this because Heat Wave is such a good book that it’s surprising I don’t love her more. I wouldn’t be surprised if others called it a masterpiece.

Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'FarrellInstructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell

While Lively’s novel is in an unspecified time, O’Farrell’s Instructions for a Heatwave (2013) is set firmly during the 1976 heatwave – including using quotes from the Drought Act 1976 as epigraphs for the different sections. The story starts in Highbury, with an Irish Catholic family who are first generation Londoners.

The heat, the heat. It wakes Gretta just after dawn, propelling her from the bed and down the stairs. It inhabits the house like a guest who has outstayed his welcome, it lies along the corridors, it circles around curtains, it lolls heavily on sofas and chairs. The air in the kitchen is like a solid entity filling the space, pushing Gretta down into into the floor, against the side of the table.

Only she would choose to bake bread in such weather.

Gretta is driven by tradition and routine, and she has made soda bread three times a week for her entire married life – and won’t let something like a heatwave get in the way of that. Her love of tradition has not been passed down to her three adult children. There is Michael Francis, whose marriage to Claire is falling apart (which he blames on her Open University degree, and the way that studying and her new friends are taking her away from him). There’s Monica, a recent stepmother to two girls who seem to despise her. And there’s Aoife, the one who escaped, living in New York and working as a sort of amanuensis for an artist. The children do not go to mass, to Gretta’s sorrow. Nor are they happy or satisfied. Each is suffering from something or other – which, perhaps a little artificially, comes to a head for each of them during this heatwave.

But the first crisis is that Robert – Gretta’s husband, and the father of these three – goes missing. He says he is going out to the shop, and he doesn’t come back.

If Lively’s contemplative novel is about character, then O’Farrell’s is about plot. That’s not to say the characters aren’t well thought through and interesting, but this is a pacy book about revelations, secrets, and decisions that will make life-long differences. It doesn’t really make sense for all of them to have epiphanies during such a short period, but we roll with it because O’Farrell is such an enjoyable writer.

She is great at making characters who are filled with flaws, and yet we want the best for. It’s not even the sort of flaws that are usually used to make a character realistic but still reassuringly empathetic. Between them, Michael Louis, Claire, and Aoife are selfish, jealous, resentful, deceitful, and thoughtless. Gretta’s failings are considered more with the frustrated affection that one might feel towards a clingy matriarch. I was relieved that her Catholic faith wasn’t treated as something that made her cruel or stupid (as so many novelists would do) – her sadness that her children don’t go to mass is recognised as an understandable human trait, even if not one the novel seems to agree with.

I found Aoife the most interesting character, not least because of her undiagnosed dyslexia. Or at least that’s what I assume it was, from the way she describes letters in words jumping around in different combinations, refusing to stay linear and safe. This is the 1970s, and she was at school in the ’50s and ’60s: her inability to read was just seen as her being wilfully naughty. O’Farrell takes this lifelong difficulty and sees how it might affect relationships, friendships, work – and the tangled web Aoife gets herself into (while still being a bullish, often bombastically unthinking character, rather than a quiet victim of circumstance).

Both novels concern heatwaves, and both have familial relationships at the heart – particularly the fraught relationship between a mother and her adult child(ren), trying to combine closeness and distance. From this starting point, it’s interesting how differently O’Farrell and Lively treat the material. It’s hard to even compare them – they are very different experiences, both rewarding and worthwhile.

Unreckoned Responsibility


Poor Maggie O’Farrell. Little did she know, in penning The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, that the weight of the last 50 years of literature was on her shoulders. As I detailed in a previous post, I regard modern literature with some suspicion, preferring the tried and true waters of 1900-1950. Against my better judgement, perhaps, I went to borders and purchased The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, based entirely on the review given by Lynne over on dovegreyreader. Waiting inside was not merely a novel, but the determining factors in whether or not I’d continue to give 2007 a chance, in the literary stakes.

Verdict : let’s not rule out the 21st century just yet.

Without giving too much away, O’Farrell’s novel documents the release of Esme Lennox from a psychiatric unit, into the care of great-niece Iris, who didn’t know Esme existed. The novel flits between this present day scenario, and the past events, focalised either through narrative, Esme’s recollections, or the uncertain memories of Kitty, Esme’s sister, now in hospital with Alzheimer’s.

It is the last of these methods which I found most demonstrated O’Farrell’s talent – the driftings of imprecise thoughts are presented so realistically, offering, in these sections, a discourse neither unified nor wholly disjointed. The clues are all there, and amalgamate towards a final comprehension of the history leading to Esme’s incarceration. Though intelligently written, one of the things I’d have to put in the ‘cons’ column is this reliance upon detective-fictionesque build up of clues, red herrings, and so forth. The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is about so much more than deducing the ending, that this structure undermined the content a little. Esme is a wonderful character, as is Kitty – Iris is never quite as satisfactory, probably because of the inevitable, but ultimately unsatisfying, inclusions of love interests. Luke could have been cut from the novel without any great loss, though Elle might not have contributed their comment to the back of my paperback. Oh, and I still don’t like the use of present tense in novels. When did that come in? Probably before I was born. But I don’t want any of these quibbles to detract from the fact that this is a hugely enjoyable, cleverly written work.


So… on which path will my reading now embark? A happy compromise, methinks. There’s little sense in only reading books out in the past few months, when there is such a heritage of literature to be explored – but I suppose being alive doesn’t necessarily equate with being unreadable, where authors are concerned(!)