Tom Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and Bad Actors

 

Having read all the other eight novels by Ann Patchett, I thought that this was the best. And that is saying something. We are in lockdown and Lara's three grown daughters are home to help with picking cherries on their parent's huge farm in Michigan. They take the opportunity to hear their mothers' story about when she was a young actress and met and performed with the budding star Peter Duke. But before that, the first nine pages (possibly the best introduction to a novel ever) Lara and her friend Veronica are still at school, helping to register people for their audition for a part in an adult amateur production of "Our Town" in the school gym. When Lara's grandmother turns up, Veronica asks her "Do you want a part? I know people, I can make you a star". "Veronica loved my grandmother. Everyone did".

But Lara's daughters, Emily, Maisie and Nell are desperate to hear about Duke, the famous actor who knew their mother at the start of his career. Lara tells us they are "waiting to hear the parts I'm never going to tell them". There are countless clever and emotional parts too numerous to mention. Early on at seventeen, Lara is in California for a screen test. There is an outdoor pool. "We need to see you swim". "Seriously? I wondered how cold the water was because that's the first thing a person from New Hampshire thinks about when someone starts talking about swimming". Little do they know.

Much later at Tom Lake, Lara is a late stand-in to play Emily in, yes, "Our Town". Where she meets Duke. This is why her girls are so interested in her story. But will they ever get the cherries picked. "We do not stop for snow in North Michigan. Schools open. Buses run". I loved who the girls were and how different they are. There is a lovely contrast between young love and Lara's marriage to Joe. Lara tells us "I learned so many things that summer at Tom Lake and most of those lessons I could have done without".

This book has made me want to watch Thornton Wilder's play "Our Town". The author loves it. Paul Newman stars as the Stage Manager in a performance on YouTube.

Isabella, middle aged and not so recently bereaved, is visited by an old friend Vinny. She lives in a small seaside resort next to the pier. Her son Laurence is a recruit in the army and visits when he can. The book was written in 1953 so there was still National Service at that time. Vinny becomes a lodger in a house that belongs to Rose Kelsey (also bereaved) and her sister Emily. "He imagined his room having once been the housekeepers sitting room ..... a sealed off part of the house". (Reminding me at eighteen of my tiny bedroom only accessed off some steep narrow back stairs with it's cupboard like door into the dining room).

Apart from Vinny's mother who comes to stay (at her favourite shop "asking lots of questions about things she had no intention of buying") and a family boarding for the summer, that's the full cast of this story about secrets. Vinny falls for the injured Emily (what was she doing in the car that killed Rose's husband), although he already has a wife of sorts. "His inability to to cross the gap from wooing to lovemaking, and many unconcluded love affairs, had left him with a large circle of female friends". His pursuit of Emily is a strange affair: "an elderly man behaving like a love lorn youth". And already married. Not Taylor's best work, but her prose is as haunting and witty as ever.

When we are introduced to the current inhabitants of Slough House one by one, the book brings us up to date with all that has been going on with the slow horses and their present state of affairs. We do have a new recruit in Ashley Khan, although her parents can find nothing about her fictitious job online. I enjoyed most of the first half as the plot builds involving first desk Diana Tavener, her Soviet counterpart and the obnoxious Anthony Sparrow, the PM's enforcer who wants to take over the security services.

Every time the story concentrates on one of Jackson Lamb's team, there is so much wit and character. In the middle there is a set piece all action surveillance operation at night in a park that is really well orchestrated. But later at a reclusive sanatorium, again at night, there is so much violence as the bad guys arrive in a case of mistaken identity. The whole novel keeps up a relentless pace all the way through. Not really my kind of book, but I now find this is the eighth book in the author's series that I have read. That must say something.