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Critiques (2)
Critique du Guardian
Tensions run high among a Chekhovian trio of sisters on a summer holiday together In her patient, unobtrusive, almost self-effacing way, Tessa Hadley has become one of this country's great contemporary novelists. She is equipped with an armoury of techniques and skills that may yet secure her a position as the greatest of them. Consider all the things she can do. She writes brilliantly about families and their capacity for splintering. She is a remarkable and sensuous noticer of the natural world. She handles the passing of time with a magician's finesse. She is possessed of a psychological subtlety reminiscent of Henry James, and an ironic beadiness worthy of Jane Austen. To cap it all, she is dryly, deftly humorous. Is that enough to be going on with? These talents are on formidable display in her latest novel, The Past. It is the story of a family and a three-week summer holiday in the house they have inherited, beneath whose affable surface run deep currents of tension. Hadley specialises in bright, brittle, defensive women with unsatisfactory love lives and a knack for self-sabotage, most notably Kate in The Master Bedroom and Stella in Clever Girl. Here she has created a Chekhovian trio of sisters who love and resent one another. Alice, the middle one, is 46, flighty, forgetful and romantic; Fran, a teacher, is practical and decisive and a mother of two young children, Ivy and Arthur; Harriet, the eldest, is independent-minded and shy, a former revolutionary in retreat from the fray. They are later joined by their brother, Roland, a pop philosopher on his third marriage, in a new white suit. Pilar, the latest wife, is one of two family outsiders, the other being Kasim, moody son of Alice's ex-boyfriend, who takes an instant shine to Molly, Roland's teenage daughter. Hadley monitors the stir of sibling loyalties and antipathies with hair-trigger sensitivity: "They knew one another well, all too well, and yet they were all continually surprised by the forgotten difficult twists and turns of one another's personalities, so familiar as soon as they appeared." Arguments flare up and feelings are outraged in a way that might, in another novel, be exhausting; one of Hadley's gifts is to describe people living on their nerves without getting on ours. The past keeps knocking at the door of the present, first in glancing references and later in a concentrated flashback. The two present-day sections sandwich a middle act, set in 1968, when young mother Jill quits her philandering husband in London and seeks refuge with her parents in the country, three children -- Harriet, Roland and baby Alice -- in tow. The dovetailing of the two stories, more nuanced, less forced than in Hadley's earlier double-narrative The London Train, is alive with echoes and resonances. When Roland considers Pilar and wonders "whether mutual incomprehension might not be the most stimulating arrangement in a marriage", it chimes with the kinder, and subtler, reflections of his grandmother Sophy on her vain clergyman husband: "part of the oddity of marriage, she thought, was in how unwise it was to attend too intently to the other person. This was the opposite to what she had naively imagined, as a girl. To the unmarried, it seemed that a couple must be intimately, perpetually exposed to each other -- but actually, that wasn't bearable". If the book is superbly clear-sighted about marriage, it is nearly as penetrating on the deceptions (and self-deceptions) of personality. Again, it spans generations: just as Jill's husband Tom imagines himself young again in his excitable reports from les evenements of May 1968 in Paris, so in the present day Harriet unconsciously reverts to childhood with her tortured diary entries about a secret crush. Heredity pounces on the unsuspecting when Pilar learns from her brother back in Argentina that a DNA test may prove they were adopted from a family of "the disappeared" in the 1970s. But nothing is clear-cut. Alice, the most childish of the adults, has a grownup understanding of her own failings, and a humility to go with it. In a lovely quiet scene she goes to the nearby church to ponder a recent galumphing offence: "Conscience -- like something weightless, cobwebby -- settled on her out of the air; the old church must be thick with it, after all the centuries of soul-searching." The contrast of age and youth is insistent, and yet Hadley may also be making a deeper point about differences in male and female attitudes to the possibility of change. Whereas the men -- a vicar-poet, a journalist, an academic -- are often pompous and theoretical in their approach to life, the women are instinctively warmer, more grounded and open to forgiveness. While Tom talks with proprietary fervour about the revolution in Paris ("The children are tearing down the prison walls"), Jill can think only of the handsome old plane trees the students are cutting down. This, too, finds its echo in the way in which Alice mourns the loss of respect for everyday things: "I hate how we throw everything away now." The sentiment will take on a larger significance as the family debates whether they can bear to sell the house, decrepit yet full to bursting with memories. In passage after passage Hadley's writing, following Updike 's precept, "gives the mundane its beautiful due". She is especially good on sounds, such as the "wooden clatter" of a pigeon's wing-beats, or of a stream "conversing urgently with itself". There are hints of Larkin in her tender descriptions of landscape and imaginative responses to the ineffable, such as the two old horses in a field overhearing Alice's voice, "which must seem a silly shiny thread drawn across the mute surface of their day". There are phrases as arresting as this on every page. Those readers yet to encounter Hadley -- enviable bunch -- may start with The Past and look forward to five previous novels and two story collections. But it doesn't really matter where you start with her, because all her books are wonderful. * Anthony Quinn's latest novel is Curtain Call (Vintage). To order The Past for [pound]12.99 (RRP [pound]16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pound]1.99. - Anthony Quinn.
Critique du Library Journal
Four siblings gather in their childhood home to determine its future. The oldest is the most distant, unsure she'll even stay the full three weeks they've planned to be there. The middle sister arrives with two children, complaining about her missing husband. The youngest sister inexplicably brings an ex-boyfriend's adult son. Their one brother comes with his teenage daughter-and introduces his third wife. Interrupting the fraught family reunion is a flashback to the titular past, which reveals how the family came to live in the home when their disappointed mother sought refuge from their philandering father. So sly is Hadley's (Clever Girl) revealing novel that even less-than-responsible direction might be forgivingly overlooked. British actress Caroline Lennon's crisp, proper narration is marred by the lack of narrative breaks that clearly appear on the page but are ignored here, resulting in unnecessarily jarring jumps in story flow. VERDICT Regardless, recommended for libraries building literary fiction audiobook collections. ["A fresh take on a familiar story of fractious family reunions where old resentments resurface, new alliances form, and long-buried secrets are uncovered": LJ 10/1/15 starred review of the Harper hc.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
