My Review Of … ‘Daughters Of The House’ by Michele Roberts

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Synopsis:

WINNER OF THE WH SMITH LITERARY AWARD

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE

Secrets and lies linger in the very walls of the solid old Normandy house where Therese and Leonie, French and English cousins, grow up after the war.

Intrigued by adults’ guilty silences and the broken shrine they find in the woods, the girls weave their own fantasies, unwittingly revealing the village’s buried shame, a shame that will haunt them both for the rest of their lives….

“Remarkable and beautifully written”

Independent On Sunday

“A brave and richly imagined novel, full of thrilling set pieces”

Guardian

“Subtle and persausive”

Cosmopolitan

About The Author:

Michele Roberts was raised, with her twin sister, in Edgware, was convent educated, read English Language and Literature at Somerville College Oxford, then went on to train as a Librarian at University College London.

Her mother was a French Roman Catholic and her father an English Protestant, so Summer holidays were always spent with her French family and to this day, Michele still divides her time between London and Mayenne, France.

She was and still is an active voice in Socialist and Feminist Politics, all of which is well documented in her 2007 published memoir Paper Houses: A Memoir of the 70s and Beyond. As a Republican, she turned down an invitation to accept an OBE, although she did accept an award from the French government and is officially ‘Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres’.

Alongside her many novels, Michele has consistently written in many other fields, including poetry and is committed to her teaching of Creative Writing, becoming Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

My Review Of:-  ‘Daughters Of The House.’

As the most successful of her novels, I guess I expected this to be a work of some worth and consequence and I can’t say that I was disappointed. It has certainly made me eager to gather together some of her other novels, to add to my ever increasing TBR list.

It tells the story of two cousins, one French, the other English, raised together for much of their lives, by their respective mothers, at the family home in France.

Twenty years later, the French born cousin Therese, has spent much of her adult life as a nun, living in a convent, whilst Leonie, the English born cousin, has continued to live in the family home, with her husband, children and mother.

Now, Leonie’s mother Madeleine is dead, and both women want the family home to be theirs, so we find Leonie taking an inventory of the contents of the house.

The items on her list, become the chapters for the novel, and tell the story of the childhood memories they evoke.

I liked the way that the opening and final chapters of the book are in the present, with the middle section being devoted to the childhood events and memories, leading to the current situation.

The chapters are kept short, with short high impact sentences, which kept my attention focused and meant that I could dip in and out of the book, although I would love to have read it in a single sitting.

It was also the first book that I can recall having read, that has no dialogue punctuation, which at first was a little disconcerting, but then became unnoticed.

When they are young, the cousins are very close, bound together by their exclusion from family secrets. Conversations held quietly by the adults tell of wartime secrets, room are designated ‘out of bounds’ and the woodland shrine a place of awe and horror.

As they approach teenage years, the friendship becomes more strained and is given more sporadically and grudgingly. Underlying jealousies begin to surface and secrets threaten their relationship.

When the shrine in the woods yields it’s terrible secret, it’s links to the house and family, start to strip away the veneer of respectability and divide the girls’ loyalties even more.

The last vestiges of friendship between them are destroyed, when an even more terrible secret, this time about their birthright, is uncovered.

After all these years apart, both daughters still only have some of the pieces, but not enough to complete the jigsaw of events, so there can be no peace or reconciliation, for either of them. A complex set of clues lead to many possibilites, but no definitive conclusions, driving each to try and purge their demons, with horrific results….

To me, the novel is solely about the relationship between the two girls, other areas are touched on, but seem of no real consequence to the theme. The characters are all well defined in their roles and where they fit into the overall sequence of events and each are endowed with their unique dangerous energy, which is both subtle and persausive, whilst being intense and compelling.

A fantastic read, I was sad when it was over.

A well deserved 4.5 out of 5 on my scale of things