The Past by Tessa Hadley - Book Review

I’ve been a fan of Tessa Hadley’s writing for some time, and have loved many of her novels, such as The Master Bedroom and The London Train.  Hadley’s writing is beautiful and precise; she can describe her characters’ emotions to a T, but she is also brilliant at evoking a sense of time and place.

In The Past, the rambling falling-down house set next to a stream in the English countryside becomes another character in the book. Its fate, whether it should be sold, renovated or kept as it is, has to be decided by the four grown-up siblings, grand children to a respected minister and poet. The future of the house runs as a theme through the book, and is the reason the four are united for a last 3-week summer holiday in Kington.

Alice is a failed actress, and at 46, the middle daughter. She has asked a young student of economics, Kasim, who is the son of Alice’s ex-lover, to accompany her. Alice's older sister, Harriet arrives alone, while her older brother, Roland, brings his new wife – his third – the glamorous and exotic Argentinian, Pilar. There’s also a dreamy teenage daughter, Molly. The youngest of the sisters, Fran comes with her two children.  

So as the reader, you think the scene is set nicely for at least some serious family fall-outs, or even some disaster, be it loss of life, dignity or virginity.

The tension is beautifully built in the first half of the novel, where we find about the siblings' childhoods, how their mother died when Fran was still very young, and how they lost their grandparents, the original occupants in Kington. There’s the promise of a burgeoning romance or two.

This is when the story moves back to the past, and we meet the grandparents, Sophie and the Vicar, and Jill, their daughter. We also get a glimpse into Jill’s turbulent marriage with her husband, the idealistic journalist, Tom.

When the story moves back to the present, the events which the author had been building up to in the first part come to pass – but mostly off camera.

And this is my only gripe with The Past. Tessa Hadley sets up the action beautifully, tantalisingly, only to let the events unfold without allowing the reader in. Only one of the outcomes is described in the present, and that too happens so quickly, as a reader you could have blinked and it’s done. The author even states this herself, ‘The whole scene was over in a matter of a few seconds.’

Still, I would recommend this novel, for the pleasure of its use of the English language and sentences such as the one below:  

‘Kasim picked another stem of grass and dusted its drooping, plumy head, heavy with seeds, against Molly’s cheeks and her closed, protuberant, mauve eyelids.’

To buy The Past by Tessa Hadley click here or tap on the image above. 

The London Train by Tessa Hadley

I've spent many hours on the train between the West Country and London, so the title of this book immediately spoke to me. I'm also a great fan of Tessa Hadley and her neat writing style; of her slow but determined narrative where an extraordinary story emerges from perfectly ordinary circumstances (taking the train to London).

The story of The London Train is told in two separate parts. First we find Paul at an old people's home where his mother has recently passed away. We follow him through his grief as he tries to carry on his life as normal with his second wife in the Welsh countryside. He struggles to write - his profession - and to be a good husband and father to his three daughters - two with his current wife and one from a previous marriage. While still having vivid dreams about his mother, he receives a call from his first wife to say Pia has gone missing. Paul goes in search of his ninenteen-year-old daughter, and finds her in a 'bleakly unloved' block of council flats near King's Cross. Unwittingly, he's sucked into her new world, and into a completely different life from his own literary one in the country. 'He had always had a superstitious fear of being shut up somewhere without books; now that it had happened he hadn't even consciously noticed.'

The second story centres around Cora, who after first losing her father, then her mother, decides to leave her civil servant husband and move to her paternal home in Cardiff. In contrast to her hectic city life as an English teacher, she starts work in the local library and begins to examine her life so far: her ambitions after university and the subsequent disappointments of her affluent life with her serious husband in London. 'I don't know how people go walking around after their mother dies. I don't know how they keep getting up in the morning.'

Both of these stories are linked by a chance meeting on the train, an event which happened three years before. At this point the pace of the novel suddenly picks up and we realise why the action in previous chapters has been slow - almost hazy. This is where the brilliance of Tessa Hadley's writing really comes to its own; with suspending the pivotal piece of plot in the novel to its last part she rewards the reader. The realisation why both Paul and Cora acted the way they did previously becomes clear, their motives understandable whereas before their actions could have been interpreted as rash or inconsistent.

This method of only revealing the past after the main stories of the characters have been told can be precarious - if we don't know the juicy part, why should we be interested in the characters in the first place? But Hadley excels in describing the ordinary to make it extraordinary - and the satisfaction of knowing the characters when the plot thickens is so much sweeter than it would've been if she'd merely told us the story in the usual timeline narrative.

I urge you to go and buy this book, and if you haven't read Tessa Hadley before, there are three other novels by her to enjoy: Accidents In The Home, Everything Will Be Alright and The Master Bedroom. These are all available from good independent bookshops. (But then I'd say that, wouldn't I?)