Rough Music, The Carer and The Boarding House

For some reason I found it hard to keep up with the switching between the two timelines set many years apart. It was not so much which characters inhabited each, but more a sense of not knowing what happened in the intervening years. It was sometimes tricky to pick up where we were the chapter before last.Two holiday properties, close to each other, on the North Cornwall coast, where the Padgett family find themselves suffering deja vu over 30 years later. Situated at the fictitious Polcamel (a combination of Polzeath and the Camel estuary), an area we know so well having visited there most of the last eighteen years. So which side of the estuary? Somewhere near Daymer Bay and New Polzeath on the Rock side of the Camel. Wadebridge is mentioned often so that would make sense.The early chapters are not very interesting, I was easily confused, but the story picks up a third way through as it gains momentum and the revelations we are promised materialise towards the end. The book is very well written and there are particular sequences that I thought were particularly good but there were other more mundane pieces. We have to wait to understand the title.

A light entertaining family drama with twists and turns along the way. Phoebe and brother Robert are approaching sixty and have employed Mandy as a carer for their elderly, frail father. Everyone has secrets that, of course, are duly revealed. My fifth novel by this author and she never disappoints.

The Boarding House is William Trevor's second novel if we discount his first (A Standard of Behaviour) that he always disowned and refused to have republished. It is not in quite the same class as the other eight I have read so far, as if this was a practice run for the prolific writing to come. It was written ten years after he moved from his native Ireland to live in England.

It is almost wholly character driven, there is little plot until nearer the end. It is definitely a black comedy, the various odd characters who inhabit the boarding house are themselves all pretty desperate people. There are some great set pieces in among some less interesting stuff. I'm still not sure what is a flannel dance, is this a dance holding flannels?