I read this book simultaneously with the Odessa File and was intending to review it here before virus problems got in the way. ‘The House at Riverton’ by Kate Morton is without doubt the best novel I have read this year (in fact, the best modern novel I have read for a very long time), and cheered me up considerably after a month spent struggling to find the motivation to wade through mediocre Christmas presents.

Despite being set in 1999, most of the action of the novel takes place in the first half of the twentieth century, in particular during the First World Wars and the years immediately after it. For me this is a magical time in literature anyway; when I was younger I read so many captivating books about girls growing up in that tranquil world which was shattered by the announcement of war. Generally they featured a dark eyed and sensitive young man who was sent off to the trenches never to return, and leaving the girl in a post war world which had changed beyond all recognition so that she was even able to walk down the street showing her ankles. Rilla of Ingleside, Flambards, The Quantocks Quartet… Actually I was so distressed by Will dying on the second page of Flambards in Summer that I never made it to the end of the Quantocks Quartet, because I felt I couldn’t cope with any more tragedy My sister has the final book in the study, and for at least ten years I have been meaning to read it and always finding a convenient excuse!

Those, of course, were children’s books and ‘The House at Riverton’ is very different. A more adult book, a more realistic book, still set in a stately home but with heroines who snort coke, star in soft porn films, and commit adultery. Interestingly, the male characters are rather pale and uninteresting, and there isn’t a single one with a hint of anything that I would describe as gumption.

The novel tells the story of Grace, a 98 year old woman who is living out her last days in a comfortable nursing home. Born at the turn of the century, she spend her youth working as a housemaid in a grand country house called Riverton. The daughters of the house were around her own age, and as the years went by she grew increasingly close to them, moving out with the elder daughter Hannah when she marries and becoming a ladies maid. She becomes privy to all the family secrets, some trivial and some quite literally explosive.

The premise of the book is that the ageing Grace has been approached by an American director who is trying to make a film about a series of events which took place at Riverton in the summer of 1924. A famous young war poet was found shot dead in the grounds of the mansion, and the police come to the conclusion that he has committed suicide. Robbie, as he was called, was a close friend of the son of the house, killed during the war, and a lover to at least one of the daughters. He was also mentally unstable, suffering from a severe version of the as yet unrecognised condition of shell shock, and the idea that he might have ended his own life was not unreasonable.

Yet this was not, in fact, what happened. Within a couple of months, the two daughters of the house are both dead. The only person left in the world who knows what really happened, who was in fact present at the tragedy, was Grace herself. For seventy years she has carried the secret by herself, letting it slip to no one, but as she feels her imminent end approaching, she begins to reminisce about times gone by and record her story, the true story, on a dictaphone to be passed on to her grandson after her death.

This is a novel full of twists. I thought pretty early on that I had figured out what the main twist of the plot was going to be; I turned out to be correct that this was indeed one of the twists, but only one, and I was kept guessing until pretty much the last page for everything else. It is also a very poignant novel. There is no happy ending, except possibly for Grace, and she doesn’t attain it until the age of 65!

Perhaps the most striking thing about the tragedy that unfolds, and the reason why Grace has dared to tell no one for so many years, is that everything which went wrong was the result of one, tiny white lie which Grace herself had told ten years previously in 1914. It wasn’t even a lie; someone assumed something which was false and for selfish reasons, Grace never got around to correcting them. Had she done so, three people might have gone on to have happy and fulfilled lives.

So, a gripping book in which the atmosphere of the era is beautifully evoked. Well written too, so the 600 pages don’t feel like a chore to read and I managed to get through them in a week. Out of all the books I have read this year, this is probably the only one I would unreservedly recommend, at least to lovers of weepy Edwardian romances

Tags: The House at Riverton

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