 |
| (Amazon UK link) |
But then I noticed that ‘Letters from the past’, which I read in June 2021, is a sequel to ‘Coming home to Island House’, which I reread last month. The characters in this family saga, set in the early years of World War II, had got under my skin. Erica James has a talent for characterisation which means I often feel a little sad when I’ve finished one of her books. It’s like saying goodbye to people I have started to care about.
So I’ve just reread ‘Letters from the past’, and found that I hadn’t remembered the story at all. It was quite confusing in the early part, the first time I read it, as there’s such a big cast, and I hadn’t recently read the first book. This time, they were all still fairly fresh in my memory, in particular Romily, who isn’t in fact related to anyone else directly, but who cares deeply for her large step-family. In a sense this is her story; but there are many other important characters and several excellent subplots.
This book is mainly set twenty years after the first one. Kit and Evelyn are married with nineteen-year-old twins. Hope and Edmund are also married, and she has become a best-selling children’s writer. He works as GP in their village. They weren’t able to have children of their own, but brought up their German foster-child Annelise, eventually adopting her. She now works at Oxford University.
The obnoxious and sadistic Arthur is as bad as ever, married to his third wife Julia, who is a damaged, subservient woman who puts up with whatever he doles out. His adult son Ralph appears to be almost as bad as his father, and his young son Charlie (whose mother is Julia) is away at boarding school, though he’s only seven.
There are other characters too, familiar from the first book, and some new ones introduced in this story. The most significant is Red St Clair, an American who meets Romily and annoys her intensely. Her publishers would like them to work together on a script, but it’s clearly not going to work. It’s also clear that they are likely to get together at some point, though it’s hard to see how this might happen with so much animosity…
However, the story starts in a very unpleasant way with some anonymous letters. They’re composed of words and letters cut out of newspapers, and sent to various women in the village. Hope gets one telling her that Edmund is unfaithful. She can’t believe it… but doubts are sown. Evelyn gets one telling her that Kit isn’t the father of her twins… and she knows that there is a faint possibility that someone else was responsible, although she has never told Kit. Florence, who works for them, has a letter too, as does the unfortunate Julia.
There are several theories about who sent the letters, but I hadn’t guessed (or remembered) who the perpetrator was until right before it was revealed. And in the meantime, the poison pen writer has spread doubt and worries, and started to cause stress between husbands and wives. But nobody is willing to tell their spouses about them…
Romily has secrets about her past, as does Red, and they gradually emerge. Annelise finds out something that worries her - and she also learns that Stanley, whom she thinks of as a brother, is in love with her. Hope and Edmund have an argument and she goes out for a walk which nearly ends in tragedy… and all this takes place towards the end of 1962, where smog still existed in London, and where there was a terrible winter, with vast amounts of snow and extreme cold.
I love the way that the people are so three-dimensional, each with their flaws, and things they don’t necessarily want to talk about. Evelyn is a bit shadowy, and her twins feel like names only. But in Kit and Hope and Romily I really felt as if I were meeting old friends again. It was nice to get to know Annalise and Stanley, and also (somewhat) Annalise’s cousin Isabella, who is now an actress. I also liked the introduction of Charlie, although for most of the book he’s away at school. And I appreciated the way that some characters decide, deliberately, to become kinder, nicer people. One in particular has something of an epiphany.
I think it’s harder to create believable villains, but Erica James has managed it well in this book. Florence’s mother-in-law is a complainer; Florence can’t do anything right, in her eyes. Arthur’s housekeeper/PA is snooty and unpleasant, too, and Arthur himself is frankly evil - he takes pleasure in hurting other people. I’m glad we don’t learn exactly what he does to Julia, nor too much detail about how he used to beat Ralph; the hints, and what we see in the book, are more than enough to make him quite a frightening person. He doesn’t seem to have any redeeming features, other than a superficial charm when he first meets people.
The book is written in short chapters, each one focussing on a different member of the family. A few are told in the first person when someone is talking about what happened in the 1940s, as if talking to someone else. It could have been confusing, but each chapter is headed with the name of the person concerned, the location and the date. And once I’d got back into feeling as if I were part of the family, I had no trouble with the regular switching of viewpoint. All their stories overlap anyway, and are all the better for having so recently reread the first book.
It’s quite a long book - over 500 pages in paperback - but I read it in just a few days. It was too easy to pick it up to read ‘just another chapter’, and then, as they’re so short, another… and I felt totally absorbed. I loved rereading this, and am already looking forward to doing so again, in another decade or so.
Highly recommended if you like women’s fiction with some depth. But I would definitely recommend reading ‘Coming home to Island House’ first. The first time I read this, I liked it but didn't love it. This time I thoroughly enjoyed it, in part because of its being a sequel.
No comments:
Post a Comment