Coming home to Island House (by Erica James)

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It’s only about six and a half years since I read Erica James’ novel ‘Coming home to Island House’. But I’ve been re-reading her novels over the past couple of years and decided I would continue even with the ones I acquired more recently. I had entirely forgotten the details of the story, though I had a vague memory of the overall plot.

Romily is the main character; she’s a vivacious, intelligent crime writer who fell in love with the much older Jack. They lived together for a while, which, in a contemporary novel would hardly raise an eyebrow. But this was in the late 1930s, and some of the residents of their village were shocked. Jack had been widowed many years earlier, and since then had a steady stream of women. Romily is the first one he truly loved, and they were recently married, in a small civil ceremony which very few people know about. 

We never learn how old Jack is; just that he’s twenty-seven years older than Romily. I assume she’s in her mid-thirties, or thereabouts, which makes him in his mid-to-late sixties. As the story starts, she’s coming back to their home, Island House, after a European tour promoting her latest book. There are rumours of war, and she’s looking forward to being home again. But then she discovers that he’s very ill… 

The bulk of the story involves a requirement by Jack that his three adult children (Arthur, Hope and Kit) and niece Allegra must live together in Island House for a full week. It’s evidently a large place since there’s room for them all. There’s a cook/housekeeper, Mrs Partridge, and a kitchenmaid called Florence whom Romily rescued from an abusive household. 

It’s primarily a character-based book, with quite a variety of different personalities. Arthur, the oldest, is not just pompous and bossy, he has a sadistically cruel streak which leads him to make some very bad decisions. Nobody seems to like him much. He’s married to Irene, who seems to keep spending his money.  Irene was originally Kit’s girlfriend, and he’s still angry that Arthur poached her, although it seems to me that he had a lucky escape. 

Kit is a very likeable man, although he has little idea what he wants to do with his life. He works in London, but is rather bored. He and his sister Hope used to be close, but they’ve grown apart. The reason for this is that Hope married a German, much to her father’s disgust. He threw her out, and she then refused to invite any of her family to her wedding. And now she’s a widow. She learns that her father is very ill, and when she decides to return to the UK she is asked an unexpected huge favour by her sister-in-law, who is married to a Jew. 

Allegra, meanwhile, has been singing in Venice, with a manager who seduced her, promoted her, and then ran off with all her earnings. She’s penniless, so when she hears that her uncle is ill, she decides to go back, at least for a while.

It’s not a fast-paced book, but once I was a few chapters into it, I could barely put it down. Erica James has a gift of creating believable people, with all too human flaws. They make mistakes, but are mostly nice underneath. The book includes a lot of explanations of past misunderstandings, and regret for previous mistakes. Allegra had left behind her best friend Elijah who was in love with her. Kit and Hope felt that their father was often angry and didn’t love them, but gradually they realise that he was grieving for their mother, and desperate to keep them all safe. 

Arthur is perhaps the least believable of the main characters. He seems to have no redeeming features at all, yet I found him rather dull rather than creepy. I do think that creating believable villains is a lot harder than creating likeable ordinary people. As a bullying older brother I could accept him; he lost his mother when he was quite young, he was sent to boarding school long before he was ready, and he was bullied there. But when his actions show him cruel and heartless he veers over into being not quite believable.

However, that’s really my only minor gripe with the book - and Arthur isn’t meant to be likeable or sympathetic. I thought everyone else was very realistic, and their interactions and conversations entirely believable. There are some children in the mix, too: the author seems to me particularly good at inventing delightful three-dimensional children. Stanley is the eleven-year-old evacuee who wins everyone’s hearts and Annaliese is a delightful toddler who plays quite a part, too.

I’m not usually a fan of books set in the war years, but perhaps that’s because they’re often grittily unpleasant with gratuitous violence. This novel doesn’t gloss over what’s going on in Europe; several of the young men in the village enlist when war is declared, and they don’t all return home. Some return with terrible injuries, and many with what would now call post-traumatic stress syndrome. 

It also explores - in a very low-key way - the changes society was experiencing in this era. Romily is an egalitarian, despite having married a wealthy landowner, and tries not to stand on ceremony with the people she employs. She’s quite unafraid of what people think of her, too, and very good at understanding what goes on inside people. The arguments and misunderstandings between family members possibly also reflect some of the conflicts on a global scale, although this is not referred to.

There are twists and turns in the book, some of them shocking - but nicely foreshadowed - and a mostly hopeful ending, although I thought I would like to have known more about what was going to happen to the characters. Then I remembered that there’s a sequel - ‘Letters from the past’, set over twenty years later but including some of the same people. So I’ll be rereading that in another month or so.

If you like character-based women’s fiction set during World War II, but set in a village that’s mostly idyllic, then this is an ideal book to read. It’s not a short novel: nearly 500 pages in my paperback edition. But I finished it in just three days. 

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