ALBION by Anna Hope, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"Combines typical ingredients of the big house novel and family saga with deep questions about individual responsibility, whether wrongs of the past can be righted, how we adapt to climate change and nature loss, and what kind of future we can shape."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. She is a writer, reviewer and active campaigner on animal and environmental issues. Her latest novel, published earlier this year, is The One True Thing. 

The big country house as a fictional setting has enduring appeal. Names come readily to mind: Downton Abbey, Brideshead, Manderley, Mansfield Park, Brandon Hall (see Graeme Fife's recent review of The Go-Between) and countless more, including the recent Saltburn. The house in Anna Hope's latest novel differs from these others in never being named, though it's certainly as grand as any of them - an eighteenth-century Greek Revivalist mansion standing in a thousand acres of Sussex pasture and woodland. The name we focus on isn't that of the house, but of the Albion Project - a ten-year rewilding project that certainly owes much to the influential and nearby Knepp Castle estate, obliquely referred to. As with the Knepp project, the ambition of owner Philip Ignatius Brooke and daughter Frannie is to extend beyond their own boundaries, creating a green corridor that will reach through Sussex and Kent countryside to the sea. 

Now Philip has died, and the novel's action takes place over five days in May during which the family reassembles for his funeral. Of his three children only Frannie, the eldest, still lives there, and is in the process of moving with her young daughter into the main house, while Philip's widow, Grace, will take over their cottage. Philip himself had inherited house and estate at just eighteen when both parents were killed in a car crash; he set up what became known as 'the English Woodstock', a festival known and fondly remembered as The Teddy Bears' Picnic. There he met his future wife, leading to a marriage from which she wishes she'd had the courage to escape. While she remained at home with the children,  he did escape - to New York, where he settled for years with another partner (and possibly another child?) before returning and zealously taking up the rewilding scheme.

Anna Hope loses no time in showing us the spiky relationships and resentments of the three grown-up children, Frannie, Isa and Milo. Frannie is named as heir in their father's will, to the disapproval of brother Milo; she in turn is impatient with Isa, who's barely been in contact; Milo, recovering from various kinds of addiction, plans an exclusive rural retreat in the grounds in which, bizarrely, he aims to convert the 1% who can afford it into benevolence that will benefit the whole of society. Frannie, faced with paying millions in inheritance tax, is desperate to find the money somehow, fretting as she tries to write her father's eulogy; Grace, relieved to exchange the house she hates for the cottage, has ambivalent feelings about her late husband and how she'll express them at his funeral. Isa, distancing herself from wealth and privilege, is a teacher in London, scornful of her sister's enterprise: "The shepherd's huts, the yurts, the caravan serving lattes to middle-aged white people while they sit on hay-bales and chatter about their Pilates teachers and their dogs. A theme park for solvent fifty-somethings, all of it about as wild as a fucking printed tea-towel." Meanwhile, seven-year-old Rowan is showing what her class teacher sees as a disturbing fascination with bodily decomposition after death.

Into this potent mix comes a young American PhD student, Clara, with a bombshell to drop. Most readers will see what's coming, but that doesn't lessen the impact when she chooses her moment to reveal the source of the estate's wealth. With mesmerising clarity, calmness and precision she compels the family to listen, making eloquent use of her encounter with Rowan playing with a box of shells.

What next? How will these descendants of Oliver Ignatius Brooke adjust to the knowledge of the vast injustices (more than one) that underpin their privilege?

I first came across this novel when it was dramatised as Radio 4's Book of the Week earlier this year. There, I thought the repercussions of Clara's revelation were disappointing, too glibly and swiftly dealt with, so I wanted to see how Anna Hope handles this in the novel. Even here, though, I'm not sure. There are various reconciliations: too many and still too quickly, because of the constraints of the five-day structure. Frannie is the one whose ending is left most open-ended and uncertain as she confronts difficult questions, both practical and ethical.

That reservation aside, I found Albion utterly compelling: it combines typical ingredients of the big house novel and family saga with deep questions about individual responsibility, whether - and how - wrongs of the past can be righted, how we adapt to climate change and nature loss, what kind of future we can attempt to shape and who will benefit. The pace is leisurely enough to draw us fully into the family's concerns, while never seeming slow; tensions crackle off the page while the depictions of the natural world are vivid and immediate, whether portraying the woodland in May extravagance, the brisk extermination of a pregnant mink or the dawn song of a nightingale. I hadn't read Anna Hope before, so this is a very impressive introduction.

Albion is published by Penguin.

Linda Newbery's The One True Thing is published by Writers Review Publishing.