The intricacies and hierarchies--and often the competitive nature--of the family dynamic are central to the fiction of Tessa Hadley (Clever Girl). In her sixth novel, The Past, four middle-aged siblings reunite at the 200-year-old house they inherited from their grandparents, tucked amid the hills of the English countryside in Kington.
The house is "mottled with brown damp, there was no central heating and the roof leaked." It is near another cottage and a church, where the family's grandfather, a famous poet, was once minister. The siblings and their significant others have gathered for a three-week summer visit to decide whether to put the old place on the market. But once the siblings convene, their old home, all it represented in the past, and how it relates to their lives in the present--along with simmering familial tensions--collide.
Hadley's prose is descriptively rich. She elevates the mundane via her keen understanding of people and the emotional complexities of marriages and families--secrets, subtle deceptions and loyalties. By structuring the novel in three parts--a flashback from 1968, set between two sections steeped in the present--Hadley contrasts ideas about age and youth, the past and present, solace and aggravation, love and resentment. The idea that, in families, siblings emerge from the same roots and same place but eventually splinter off in different directions is at the heart of this tender, understated novel. It examines how we never really escape the upheavals of the past; they seep into our being. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines