feather_ghyll (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
feather_ghyll) wrote2018-12-24 04:54 pm
feather_ghyll) wrote2018-12-24 04:54 pm
REVIEW: The Returning Tide
It's well over a month and a half since I posted last, but in that time, I haven't read much of the type of thing I'd post about here. In fact, one of the things about these holidays I was most excited about was the opportunity to read books from beginning to end, so there ought to be more posts to come!
For now, I have an actual review:
The Returning Tide: Liz Fenwick. Orion, 2017
This is the fifth novel in Fenwick’s ‘Cornwall’ series. Rachel Hoare offers a quote suggesting it’s ‘a perfect holiday read’. As someone who has read it whilst on holiday, I’d disagree with that. It quickly becomes clear that the main character is embittered, or angry, hurt and betrayed to be precise, unwilling to face up to something that happened 70 years ago and forgive. A fun character to spend all those chapters with!
It’s not even as if there’s a great mystery as to what happened all those years ago, one can work out the outlines of it quite quickly, and as we meet Elle Rowse’s stepgrandchildren and as the narrative crosses the Atlantic to a pair of twins waiting for the death of their beloved ‘Grandie’ – their great-grandfather – on the Eastern seaboard, it’s easy to see where healing and restoration will come from. There are surprises in the how, but not many. This would be fine if the writing wasn’t often banal, with this annoying habit of the last line of a paragraph contradicting what’s gone before in said paragraph. This is mainly in passages recounting characters' thoughts.
The novel combines two timelines, the summer/autumn of 2015 and the events towards the end of World War 2. In the present, Peta Rowse, who appeared in ‘Under a Cornish Sky’ – in fact, characters from several of Fenwick’s past novels appear naturally enough here – is going to get married. Despite having the uncanny ability to read what’s going on within people, she wants to get married at home, a house named Windward, 70 years after an unhappy ceremony that her stepgrandmother remembers only too well. This decision and the seventieth anniversary of the end of the war bring back painful memories that Elle would rather not face. In addition, Peta’s older brother Jack is opposed to the wedding, partly because Peta is quite young, but mainly because he’s set agin love for his own reasons.
In the 1940s, eighteen year old identical twins Adele and Amelia are old enough to join the WRENs. Amelia will stay at home in Cornwall and drive officers, while Adele is to train to be a telegraphist. You can tell that Fenwick did her research (the odd bit of anachronistic dialogue aside), and the way that Morse becomes a part of Adele’s life, like a new language, is well done. We also see that before the great betrayal, Adele was the serious one, compared to the more reckless Amelia, very repressed because of her upbringing – the arrival of American soldiers is a big deal. She also thought people should protect themselves and avoid love and the probable heartache it would bring in wartime. Of course, she falls in love.
Back in the present, Lara has had a tumultuous year – losing her job after fighting with her boss, newly divorced, and the Grandie who was the father figure she and her twin Leo lacked is dying. After he passes away, she resolves to combine a visit to a friend in Cornwall with research into her mysterious great-grandmother, who she always thought was the love of Grandie’s life, but after his dying words, she isn’t so sure. She’s slightly underdeveloped – on the whole, Fenwick avoids the lacunae that have driven me mad in the past, but falls into the trap of repetition, but I think we missed the bit where she tells Jack she was divorced. But then, towards the end, Jack closes off from her for no clear reason other than increasing the tension.
Fenwick thanks a lot of people for helping her create the book, but they all seem to have missed the POV slips, and the other issues I had. But, then again, I thought that Fenwick conveyed Lara’s chef-like instincts and imagination and how taste was her most important sense well. Does it say something about my slide into middle age or just my inclinations that I hankered for more about the quieter love affair of Elle’s marriage, and was curious as to what Andrew had thought of her when he’d first met her during wartime and when he came across her again?
(Lightly edited 6/8/19.)
For now, I have an actual review:
The Returning Tide: Liz Fenwick. Orion, 2017
This is the fifth novel in Fenwick’s ‘Cornwall’ series. Rachel Hoare offers a quote suggesting it’s ‘a perfect holiday read’. As someone who has read it whilst on holiday, I’d disagree with that. It quickly becomes clear that the main character is embittered, or angry, hurt and betrayed to be precise, unwilling to face up to something that happened 70 years ago and forgive. A fun character to spend all those chapters with!
It’s not even as if there’s a great mystery as to what happened all those years ago, one can work out the outlines of it quite quickly, and as we meet Elle Rowse’s stepgrandchildren and as the narrative crosses the Atlantic to a pair of twins waiting for the death of their beloved ‘Grandie’ – their great-grandfather – on the Eastern seaboard, it’s easy to see where healing and restoration will come from. There are surprises in the how, but not many. This would be fine if the writing wasn’t often banal, with this annoying habit of the last line of a paragraph contradicting what’s gone before in said paragraph. This is mainly in passages recounting characters' thoughts.
The novel combines two timelines, the summer/autumn of 2015 and the events towards the end of World War 2. In the present, Peta Rowse, who appeared in ‘Under a Cornish Sky’ – in fact, characters from several of Fenwick’s past novels appear naturally enough here – is going to get married. Despite having the uncanny ability to read what’s going on within people, she wants to get married at home, a house named Windward, 70 years after an unhappy ceremony that her stepgrandmother remembers only too well. This decision and the seventieth anniversary of the end of the war bring back painful memories that Elle would rather not face. In addition, Peta’s older brother Jack is opposed to the wedding, partly because Peta is quite young, but mainly because he’s set agin love for his own reasons.
In the 1940s, eighteen year old identical twins Adele and Amelia are old enough to join the WRENs. Amelia will stay at home in Cornwall and drive officers, while Adele is to train to be a telegraphist. You can tell that Fenwick did her research (the odd bit of anachronistic dialogue aside), and the way that Morse becomes a part of Adele’s life, like a new language, is well done. We also see that before the great betrayal, Adele was the serious one, compared to the more reckless Amelia, very repressed because of her upbringing – the arrival of American soldiers is a big deal. She also thought people should protect themselves and avoid love and the probable heartache it would bring in wartime. Of course, she falls in love.
Back in the present, Lara has had a tumultuous year – losing her job after fighting with her boss, newly divorced, and the Grandie who was the father figure she and her twin Leo lacked is dying. After he passes away, she resolves to combine a visit to a friend in Cornwall with research into her mysterious great-grandmother, who she always thought was the love of Grandie’s life, but after his dying words, she isn’t so sure. She’s slightly underdeveloped – on the whole, Fenwick avoids the lacunae that have driven me mad in the past, but falls into the trap of repetition, but I think we missed the bit where she tells Jack she was divorced. But then, towards the end, Jack closes off from her for no clear reason other than increasing the tension.
Fenwick thanks a lot of people for helping her create the book, but they all seem to have missed the POV slips, and the other issues I had. But, then again, I thought that Fenwick conveyed Lara’s chef-like instincts and imagination and how taste was her most important sense well. Does it say something about my slide into middle age or just my inclinations that I hankered for more about the quieter love affair of Elle’s marriage, and was curious as to what Andrew had thought of her when he’d first met her during wartime and when he came across her again?
(Lightly edited 6/8/19.)