feather_ghyll (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
feather_ghyll) wrote2020-04-14 04:51 pm
feather_ghyll) wrote2020-04-14 04:51 pm
REVIEW: The Big House
The Big House: Helena McEwen (Bloomsbury, 2000)
I very much admired Invisible River, therefore I got this book and it was next on my ‘To read’ pile, but when I started it, I was regretting not skipping it, because it opens with the narrator as a grieving woman. She’s at the big house of the title, on the verge of selling it, and the bulk of the novel is her memories of a year from her childhood there. It’s bookended by a brief return to the present.
Given everything that’s going on, I was not in the mood for literary fiction, where there is no plot, about what seemed to be a family with serious mental ill-health, as you can imagine. Fortunately, the childhood section is much more successful and balanced. This was McEwen’s first novel. I’m trying to decide if the book would have worked without our knowing anything of Papa, James or Kitty’s fates, or if seeking clues about what the children would grow up into added impetus to the reading. However, when we first flashed back to the nursery days, I expected that we’d then move on through the years and catch up with the opening, which didn’t happen.
It struck me in the opening part that the vocabulary was unsophisticated, while the language was evocative. The voice works much better for a young child, who is even more innocent than the heroine of ‘Invisible River.’
It’s expressionistic, with the reader having to pick up clues as they go along, like characters’ relations to the narrator, her name, the family’s background and so on. That’s the way things are as far as the narrator is concerned, so there’s little exposition. I was never clear on who most of the staff were, apart from Doreen, the children’s nanny and most prominent caretaker.
What I did glean is that Elizabeth, nicknamed Specky, is closest in age to brother James, an imp of mischief who wants to play soldiers a lot. She is synesthetic and very sensitive, which makes for an odd mix of perspicacity and childlike innocence. She’s earned the label of not being all there.
It is a child’s eye view of the world, familiar in a sense except she and her siblings live in a country house in Scotland. Her parents are titled and Catholic. There are glimpses of tensions – a distant mother, a father with a problematic relationship to drink that Elizabeth thinks of as a monster. (That’s the alcoholism, not the father himself.)
Nature plays an important role, the children are as much outside as inside, and Elizabeth’s world contains what she ‘sees’ in people’s eyes, fairies and angels. It would be interesting to see McEwen write something that’s more fantastical/supernatural, rather than something with magic realist elements.
The book turned out to be more enjoyable than I thought after my first sitting. At its best, it’s vivid and insightful. Some things could have been subtler, and I would have preferred a different structure.
I very much admired Invisible River, therefore I got this book and it was next on my ‘To read’ pile, but when I started it, I was regretting not skipping it, because it opens with the narrator as a grieving woman. She’s at the big house of the title, on the verge of selling it, and the bulk of the novel is her memories of a year from her childhood there. It’s bookended by a brief return to the present.
Given everything that’s going on, I was not in the mood for literary fiction, where there is no plot, about what seemed to be a family with serious mental ill-health, as you can imagine. Fortunately, the childhood section is much more successful and balanced. This was McEwen’s first novel. I’m trying to decide if the book would have worked without our knowing anything of Papa, James or Kitty’s fates, or if seeking clues about what the children would grow up into added impetus to the reading. However, when we first flashed back to the nursery days, I expected that we’d then move on through the years and catch up with the opening, which didn’t happen.
It struck me in the opening part that the vocabulary was unsophisticated, while the language was evocative. The voice works much better for a young child, who is even more innocent than the heroine of ‘Invisible River.’
It’s expressionistic, with the reader having to pick up clues as they go along, like characters’ relations to the narrator, her name, the family’s background and so on. That’s the way things are as far as the narrator is concerned, so there’s little exposition. I was never clear on who most of the staff were, apart from Doreen, the children’s nanny and most prominent caretaker.
What I did glean is that Elizabeth, nicknamed Specky, is closest in age to brother James, an imp of mischief who wants to play soldiers a lot. She is synesthetic and very sensitive, which makes for an odd mix of perspicacity and childlike innocence. She’s earned the label of not being all there.
It is a child’s eye view of the world, familiar in a sense except she and her siblings live in a country house in Scotland. Her parents are titled and Catholic. There are glimpses of tensions – a distant mother, a father with a problematic relationship to drink that Elizabeth thinks of as a monster. (That’s the alcoholism, not the father himself.)
Nature plays an important role, the children are as much outside as inside, and Elizabeth’s world contains what she ‘sees’ in people’s eyes, fairies and angels. It would be interesting to see McEwen write something that’s more fantastical/supernatural, rather than something with magic realist elements.
The book turned out to be more enjoyable than I thought after my first sitting. At its best, it’s vivid and insightful. Some things could have been subtler, and I would have preferred a different structure.