{"id":6157,"date":"2015-08-31T12:04:46","date_gmt":"2015-08-31T12:04:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=6157"},"modified":"2015-09-07T11:47:44","modified_gmt":"2015-09-07T11:47:44","slug":"the-past-by-tessa-hadley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=6157","title":{"rendered":"The Past by Tessa Hadley"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Jonathan Cape 3 September 2015 <\/strong><\/p>\n

368pp, hardback, \u00a316.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kington House is a small Somerset rectory, built c.1820.\u00a0 Occupied for years by the bookish and \u2018very high church\u2019 minister and poet Grantham Fellowes, and his wife Sophy, it is the beloved childhood home of their four grandchildren:\u00a0 Harriet, Roland, Alice and Fran.\u00a0 The time has come for them to consider selling it.<\/p>\n

One hot summer\u2019s day, they begin to assemble, for an over-ambitious three-week stay during which a decision must be reached.\u00a0 Alice brings 20-year-old Kasim, the son of her ex-lover.\u00a0 Fran brings her two young children, Ivy and Arthur, nine and six, but not their father, Jeff.\u00a0 Harriet, who has no children and loves solitude, comes alone.\u00a0 Roland brings his new, Argentinian, second wife, Pilar, and sixteen-year-old Molly, his daughter from the previous marriage. The scene is set for misunderstandings worthy of an Iris Murdoch novel.<\/p>\n

Hadley\u2019s characters are a bracing mix.\u00a0 They start arguing almost immediately.\u00a0 Alice, an actress manqu\u00e9e <\/em>and given to melodrama, <\/em>arrives first (she thinks) and does the flowers.\u00a0 Fran is next:\u00a0 frazzled mum, and teacher of Maths at her local comprehensive, she launches into preparation of supper.\u00a0 Harriet (who arrived first but made herself scarce) works with asylum seekers; she is, for various reasons, distinctly uptight.\u00a0 Roland, annoyingly, arrives a day late.\u00a0 He is an academic philosopher, critic and talking head.\u00a0 His wife is a commercial lawyer: brisk, modern, well-organized, smart, she appears to be everything Roland\u2019s sisters are not.\u00a0 Kasim is a moody young man, less confident than he appears.\u00a0 Molly, who catches his attention, is, to begin with, innocently solemn.<\/p>\n

The key fact is that the siblings\u2019 mother, Jill, an adored only child, died young, and their father abandoned them.<\/p>\n

So begins a story in which the reader has access to the interior lives of most of the central characters.\u00a0 Hadley is very good on this hitherto close-knit family\u2019s assumptions, sensitivities and \u2018tipping-points\u2019, and their ways of provoking each other: \u2018They knew each other so well, all too well, and yet they were all continually surprised by the forgotten difficult twists and turns of one another\u2019s personalities, so familiar as soon as they appeared.\u2019 She is also very good on the young children, especially on how alert they are to the adults\u2019 changes of mood, how easily they misinterpret what they cannot yet understand, and on what they get up to when preoccupied grown-ups leave them to their own devices.<\/p>\n

Ivy and Arthur have a sub-plot all of their own, in which they discover the rotting remains of what they think is a local dog in an abandoned cottage strewn with pages from porn magazines.\u00a0 Thoroughly disturbed, Ivy invents a ritual into which she co-opts her younger brother.\u00a0 No-one can think what has got into her. The adults, meanwhile, are coping badly with the effects of each other\u2019s company and their memories.\u00a0 Both Alice and Harriet snoop in their brother\u2019s room, and Alice reads aloud some of his letters to their dying mother, causing enormous offence to almost everyone.<\/p>\n

A vivid middle section, set in 1968, gives us an insight into their mother\u2019s story.\u00a0 Jill arrives home abruptly, with her three children, having decided to leave her husband.\u00a0 Hettie and Roly and little Ali are shown as young allies, sensitive to their mother\u2019s moods and in love with the house and their grandmother.\u00a0 We learn that Jill was clever, the apple of her father\u2019s eye, and that her journalist husband Tom was unfaithful.\u00a0 Just as abruptly, Jill decides to go back to him, but not before having a brief fling of her own.<\/p>\n

Back in the present, with constant rain, tensions rise in Kington House.\u00a0 Pilar is distracted by her own family history; she has confided in Harriet, not realizing that Harriet has a crush on her, and this leads to a near-fatal misunderstanding.\u00a0 Kasim and Molly have drawn closer, watched and assisted ever more closely by the two little spies, Ivy and Arthur.\u00a0 A somewhat melodramatic denouement concludes with no bones broken and a decision to sell.<\/p>\n

From someone who can describe an English waterfall in summer so brilliantly as \u2018a swell of liquid in a sodden long fall of emerald moss\u2019 and as \u2018a swelling silver rope\u2019, Hadley\u2019s rendering of the wider Somerset landscape, somewhere between the coast and Exmoor, is disappointingly imprecise.\u00a0 However, on emotional extremes she is accurate to the nth degree.\u00a0 As Alice tends the wounded Harriet, she is \u2018fearful, to see how far her sister was straying from her old self, undoing the vexed knots which had held her tight.\u00a0 She knew from experience what a great labour it was, binding up again all the mess of self, which in your extremity you had unbound.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/p>\n

Hadley is very good on this hitherto close-knit family\u2019s assumptions, sensitivities and \u2018tipping-points\u2019, and their ways of provoking each other: \u2018They knew each other so well, all too well, and yet they were all continually surprised by the forgotten difficult twists and turns of one another\u2019s personalities, so familiar as soon as they appeared\u2019 […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6157"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6207,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6157\/revisions\/6207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}