A sluggish and disjointed slow-burn mystery that kept changing perspective.
Nell Galilee has reluctantly returned to her insular home town for a family party after nearly seven years away following the death of her father. Husband, Chris, was behind the decision to combine attending the party with taking his twelve-year-old daughter, Maude, away for a holiday in the wake of problems at school. Recently Nell and Maude’s relationship has disintegrated and Maude is craving her father’s attention after her mother’s remarriage and the recent birth of a step-brother. A last minute booking by Chris sees the trio staying at Elder House, an imposing house overlooking the surrounding houses of Bishops Yard and backed up against a cliff. Although the house has a wealth of history it has none of the inviting features of a holiday let and Nell feels uncomfortable from the start with a smell of damp, decaying earth filling her senses. Chris is distracted by a problem at the gallery the couple own and Nell, by her desperate need to know if she has conceived, whilst Maude is acting like a spoilt brat. It doesn’t take long for neighbour Carolyn Wilson, a supposed old school friend that Nell struggles to remember, to impose and start pestering Nell about the shadowing patch of land behind the house that she calls the drying ground. Clearly keen to befriend Nell she seems to have a fixation about Elder House and an evident dislike towards the far less abrasive Gina Verrill, owner of Rowan Cottage, also situated within Bishops Yard.
Maude, meanwhile, is taken with a series of carvings in the beams of her attic room and rather entranced by the house, however it is the discovery of a void in the wall and a hiding place that gives up a curious object which concerns the entire family. When Chris returns home to see to work issues, relations between step-daughter and step-mother turn ever more fractious with Maude reading up on the history of Elder House and local folklore. The relationship between Nell and Maude, who is constantly spoiling for a fight with her step-mother, simmers with tension but as the story unfolds there are several other troubled mother and daughter relationships that prove equally fascinating. For me this was the most compelling aspect of the novel which I found a disjointed read with frequent and abrupt changes of perspective that made it hard to gain any traction as to what was going on. I did not find the strange noises or things being moved around the house unsettling but the more of these incidents I read about without the story actually going anywhere meaningful, the more frustrated I got! A further point of confusion was that I couldn’t envisage the set-up of Bishops Yard or where Gina or Carolyn’s cottages and the drying ground were situated in relation to Elder House. Overall a slow-moving story with the entire mystery of Elder House rattled through at breakneck speed in a denouement that leaves no opportunity for reflection.
Maude, meanwhile, is taken with a series of carvings in the beams of her attic room and rather entranced by the house, however it is the discovery of a void in the wall and a hiding place that gives up a curious object which concerns the entire family. When Chris returns home to see to work issues, relations between step-daughter and step-mother turn ever more fractious with Maude reading up on the history of Elder House and local folklore. The relationship between Nell and Maude, who is constantly spoiling for a fight with her step-mother, simmers with tension but as the story unfolds there are several other troubled mother and daughter relationships that prove equally fascinating. For me this was the most compelling aspect of the novel which I found a disjointed read with frequent and abrupt changes of perspective that made it hard to gain any traction as to what was going on. I did not find the strange noises or things being moved around the house unsettling but the more of these incidents I read about without the story actually going anywhere meaningful, the more frustrated I got! A further point of confusion was that I couldn’t envisage the set-up of Bishops Yard or where Gina or Carolyn’s cottages and the drying ground were situated in relation to Elder House. Overall a slow-moving story with the entire mystery of Elder House rattled through at breakneck speed in a denouement that leaves no opportunity for reflection.