The Fifth Summer (by Titia Sutherland)

(Amazon UK link)

It’s a long time since I read the novels by Titia Sutherland. I recalled enjoying them, but not much else about them. So I decided to reread them, in the order in which she wrote them. It’s over twenty years since I read ‘The fifth summer’, and I had entirely forgotten the people and the storyline. 

The main characters are a family of four: Will and Lorna have been contentedly married for a long time, and have two teenage children. Debbie is eighteen, Fergus is sixteen. For the past four years they have thoroughly enjoyed delightful summer holidays in a villa in Italy, owned by an older woman called Phoebe. As the story opens, they’re due to go there again, for the fifth summer. 

But they’re not as happy as they used to be. Will clearly has a secret: a health problem which he hasn’t told Lorna about. This has caused other problems in their marriage, and she feels as if he has withdrawn from her. Lorna is a writer, and often retreats to her writing for solace, but she is beginning to wonder if Will has found someone else. 

Debbie is very conscious of her appearance; she’s overweight, but unwilling to do anything much about it. She longs to find a boyfriend, but is convinced that no boys will be interested in her. And Fergus, too, has started noticing women, fantasising about going to bed with them, but quite uncertain how to get started.

It’s a book about family relationships, about growing up, and about trust and security. I found it a bit frustrating at first as the viewpoint changes so quickly, often within just a page. There were times when I wasn’t sure whose viewpoint was being expressed, and had to go back a few sentences to figure it out. And yet, somehow, despite this being frowned upon in most writing advice books, it works. I didn’t feel very attached to anyone, but I did feel as if I got to know something of how each person was feeling and thinking.

I liked Will very much. He’s gentle, hard-working, and cares deeply for Lorna. He has a sense of humour too, and loves to relax on holiday. Lorna is a more complex person, and Will really has no idea that she’s so intuitively aware that something is wrong. I could see both points of view. 

I didn’t relate much to Debbie, but thought Fergus an interesting person too. He's quite like Lorna in personality, and very aware of tensions and stresses going on around him. His teenage hormones sometimes get in the way of his common sense and intuition, but perhaps that’s not surprising. He seems quite realistic, in a 1990s way. For this book is over thirty years old. People don’t change so much, but behaviours and language do. There are, obviously, no mobile phones; people still hand-write letters, and make phone calls with what we now refer to as landlines. 

They also smoke excessively, something which was never part of my culture, and which didn’t seem to me all that common even in the 1990s, particularly in families like this one which evidently have a fair amount of money. The children are at boarding schools, they have family holidays abroad, and they eat out in an era when it was much less common for Brits to do so. They also seem to drink rather a lot - and even Fergus is offered both wine and cigarettes. 

But other than that, I thoroughly enjoyed re-reading this book. There are other characters too, catalysts for what transpires in the second half of the book. There are friendships and low-key romances that develop, and the threat of adultery too, but I had entirely forgotten whether or not this would happen at some point.

The conversations seem believable, the relationships authentic, and the dramatic climax of the book quite shocking, with tension building for a couple of pages; we then don’t know what the outcome will be for another few pages. 

All in all, I thought this an excellent book and would recommend it to anyone who likes fairly gentle women’s fiction that’s relationship-based. There’s nothing explicit (though some things are implied) and minimal bad language. 

'The fifth summer' is long out of print, but sometimes found inexpensively second-hand. 

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