Before We Say Goodbye (by Louise Candlish)

(Amazon UK link)

Since I very much enjoyed reading the novels I’ve been given by Louise Candlish, I decided to re-read them, interspersed with others, starting with the ones I read the longest time ago. I’ve just finished ‘Before we say Goodbye’, a novel which I first read twelve years ago. I remembered liking it very much, but had totally forgotten the story.

Sometimes when I re-read a book after a gap of a decade or so, parts of it come back to me and I remember how it ended. That wasn’t the case with this book, so I had the very pleasant feeling of reading a book that felt new, but which I knew I would like. And by the time I was about half way through, I could barely put it down.

The novel is told mostly in the first person by Olivia, who is married to Russell. They have two sons, aged 12 and 14, but we first meet Olivia going to see her frail, dying mother Maggie. Maggie clearly wants to say something to her - they’ve had a stressful relationship - and Olivia doesn’t want to hear it. Instead she wants to ask a question that has been bothering her for over twenty years - but there’s no response.

Maggie’s funeral is the catalyst for what appears, at first, to be soul-searching for Olivia, who’s clearly very stressed, unsure what her role in life is, and feeling rather unnecessary to her family. And when she receives a note, apparently from her mother, she decides to take a break - to go away and try to explore issues from her past. Russell is very understanding - he’s a good husband, if undemonstrative, and turns out to be a good father, although he hadn’t previously taken a lot of interest in his household or his sons’ various chauffeuring needs.

For Olivia’s short break - a weekend, she says, and then a week - turns into a much longer time away. She meets someone she was very close to as a teenager, and she needs to talk, to relive some of their former closeness, to be away from responsibilities and reminders of her everyday life. She’s feeling numb, torn apart, and it’s quickly evident that it’s not just grief for the loss of her mother; it’s grief for a loss many years earlier, for unresolved tensions, and the need to find answers to some of her questions.

There’s a lot of heart-searching but it’s done so well that I didn’t find it tedious or overdone at all. There are some forays into the past, to Olivia’s mid-teens, and we learn the pain she and her brother felt when Maggie left home temporarily or, on one occasion, for more than a year. The irony of Olivia having left her family is clear to the reader, not so much to Olivia herself until near the end of her lengthy break.

And it’s not clear what’s going to happen. She’s torn between two families, feeling split between two lives: as a busy mother in London, and as a more relaxed person in Dorset, in an idyllic setting that feels as if it could last forever. I hadn’t remember the outcome, though I hoped it would be positive - yet unsure how that could happen.

The characters are very well-drawn in this book; there’s a good supporting cast of relatives and friends, and a delightful five-year-old girl called Wren. I had no problem recalling who was whom, at least most of the time, and I could empathise with a lot of Olivia’s feelings (or lack of them at times), though my own experience of life is far removed from hers.

A few chapters are told from other points of view - mostly Russell’s, as he becomes increasingly frustrated at not knowing where his wife is, or how long she’s likely to stay away. He feels quite believable, annoyed but also realising how unappreciative he has been, and just how much she does to keep the family going. The one part I didn’t like was a rather sordid scene with a babysitter, but it doesn’t go into many details, and was probably necessary to give balance to the story and to enable the conclusion to lead to hope for the future.

Very highly recommended if you enjoy women’s fiction with lots of inward looking discussion, and gradual resolution of issues - some of which emerge later in the book - from the past.

Review copyright 2021 Sue's Book Reviews