How It All Began, A Sweet Obscurity and Windmill Hill

 

A poignant novel that I thought started off so well but somehow lost it's way before bringing it all together by the end. A story of interconnecting lives of the nine main characters. It all begins (as the title suggests) with a mugging. Elderly Charlotte is left injured on the pavement and ends up convalescing with her daughter Rose and her husband Gerry. Their children are grown and never enter the fray. Now Rose is a PA to the retired (and famous in some circles) Henry ("even Prime Ministers consulted him"). He is seventy six and when invited to give a lecture, loses his notes. "You can't bloody well remember what you were going to say next when you know perfectly well what it was". I can sympathise.

When Rose has to stay at home to look after her mother, it's Henry's niece Marion who takes over helping him. She's an interior designer whose business gets into trouble. Not only that but she has a lover called Jeremy whose wife Stella finds out and there is hell to pay. Apart from Mark who only appears at the end, the only other character is Anton. An intelligent Central European who is foisted on Charlotte to learn to read English. And so it goes.

The author gives us short alternating sections on these people's lives. In a way that keeps us interested, in other ways it's too much of a distraction. I liked how the injured, but recovering Charlotte is beginning to reinvent herself, especially in her reading material. "Why life speeds up as you get older". Later I liked how the relationship between Rose and Anton blossoms. But the men are all caricatures and do not come out well. But the prose is great, and that's what kept me going.

I enjoyed the alternating chapters about the separated Giles and Eliza. The first lives with his new partner Julia and the latter with her dead sister Hannah's child Dido. These are clever middle class people, although Eliza refuses any support and lives frugally with Dido. We hear all about their backgrounds before another character appears. Pearce is a farmer in Cornwall and it's only when Eliza and Dido share a dilapidated caravan in the wilds outside St Just do the stories come together.

There is one chapter here, when Eliza joins a madrigal group, that her interaction with the singers is truly exceptional. And here is Pearce. Of course having holidayed in Cornwall so many times, there is plenty for me to find interesting. "Their car climbed the downs above Wadebridge", and a visit to St Michael's Mount etc. Giles is, interestingly, a counter tenor who is to rehearse an important performance.

I was not impressed with leaving Hannah's story and the connection with her daughter until very late on. A secondary story about the search involving an ancient madrigal was never fully realised, and the book sort of peters out at the end. But the research on many fronts is impressive. I'm not sure that it warranted 500 pages, I haven't read one that long for ages. But the writing is splendid and there was much to enjoy.

Astrid is eighty two and owns a windmill (now dilapidated) next to her cottage in Sussex. We hear an awful lot about it's features. Astrid was once a famous actress whose career was brought to a sudden end because she somehow takes the blame for a death that was not her fault. She now lives in the cottage with a Mrs Baker her companion "broad in the beam, she had the strength and flexibility of a young shot putter". They live with their dogs who are ever present in the story.

Astrid is off to Scotland to visit Magus her ex-husband, an even more famous actor and film star, now on his last legs. She needs to confront him about a memoir that might include that awful incident from forty five years ago. The two of them in a Tudor hunting lodge, a young actress and a director. But her journey only briefly starts each chapter before it delves again into the past. Somehow this reflects Astrid's deteriorating faculties as her memories (and of course at eighty two there are many) invade the present. I just wanted her to get to Scotland, but soon I realised this will only happen later. Over a hundred pages through and she is still at the airport.

So the book is about the past, especially when Nina, the ghostwriter of that memoir turns up. There is one superb section where she and Astrid share similar experiences. It turns out that Astrid was famous for her Shakespeare roles "even though his women end up mad or dead". (Except perhaps Cordelia). But the lies that ended her career are eventually put to bed. I didn't remember that Lucy Atkins writes so well. Perhaps this latest novel is the shape of things to come.