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.

See also Anna Hope's Expectation, reviewed by Claire Grint of Cogito Books, Hexham.

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

Guest review by Penny Dolan: HORSE by Geraldine Brooks

 

"Her historical and geographical settings feel convincingly well-researched, whether she is describing families and their great estates, life on the Mississippi or the horrors of the American civil war."

Penny Dolan works as a children’s storyteller and writer. Her last novel for older children, A Boy Called Mouse, was nominated for the Young Quills Historical Fiction Award, and she is currently completing a companion book. As well as being a regular reviewer here, she posts on The History Girls, on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure and can be found on Twitter @PennyDolan1.


Horse, by Geraldine Brooks, a Pulitzer winning novelist, appeared on my book group’s reading list. Its nomination by a member who, to our surprise, is a part-owner of a racehorse, gave Horse strong equestrian support. Additionally, when our local library supplied not four but eight new hardback copies, it was clear that somewhere in the county was a librarian who thought the novel worth purchasing. But was it worth reading? Here are my thoughts.

Brooks’ wide-ranging novel is spread between three American centuries, being a narrative about the early growth of horse-racing and about the meanings within that word “race”. Horse revolves around three specific ideas: a bay foal that became a prize-winning stallion, a lost equine portrait and a skeleton stored within the Smithsonian Museum.

The cover design gives a glimpse at an old painting which reveals a formally dressed black groom holding the rein of a tall brown horse and a black jockey in the coloured silks of the 1850s. Both men appear wary about being “uncovered”. This groom and the bay horse form the core of Brooks’ novel.

When the reader first meets Jarrett, he is an enslaved boy, working beside his father in the stables of a rich Kentucky landowner. After forming a deep bond with the new-born foal named Darley, Jarrett stays close to the creature during its early years. When the colt, re-named Lexington, passes to another landowner, Jarrett follows.

We see that his life is clearly easier than that of black slaves out in the fields. Jarrett is clothed, fed and treated well, principally because of his value to Lexington. Yet both are at the mercy of the wealth, whims and promises of their owners. For example, although gambler and race-course owner Ten Broek had given his word that Lexington would never be whipped, as soon as he has starts promoting timed, high-stakes races on his track, that promise gets forgotten:

Jarrett ‘could see the horse’s flanks heaving in obvious distress. He turned on (the jockey) Meichon. “What were you rowling him for?” he cried. “You could see it wasn’t in him.”

Meichon looked defiant. “Marse Ten Broek say I ‘ave to ride ‘ard. I think – they say – he ‘as bet against us so ‘e want no person to say he cheat.”

Jarrett threw his head back and cursed the sky.’

Even as Jarrett curses, he knows that challenging the master’s actions could mean being sent out to work in the fields or sold.

Moreover, throughout the book, Brooks emphasises his situation as evident in her chapter headings: at first he is Warfield’s Jarrett, then Ten Broek’s Jarrett and finally Alexander’s Jarrett. He is a man without independence.

Around this historical core, Brooks wraps a contemporary tale about two academics meeting in Washington in 2019. Jess, an Australian, and interested in bones since childhood, is an anthropologist and Smithsonian scholar. who starts to study a forgotten equine skeleton to discover more about the horse’s identity and power of endurance. Theo, an Afro-American art historian, is studying the role of Black men during the early years of horse-racing. When an energetic dog brings the pair together, their quest leads them through all the hidden archives of the Institute. However, their deepening relationship also emphasises social pressures within modern America and the insidious influence of prejudice.

The third thread in the novel lies in that mysterious painting partly seen on the cover. An early character, Thomas J. Scott, is a racing journalist and a hopeful equine portraitist. As he paints Dr Warfield’s horses, he notices how helpful and sensitive the boy is, and does something kind.

“I remembered I’d promised him a painting . . . and as sometimes happens when the stakes are small, the painting came together with an uncommon felicity. I captured the light on that rich bay coat and the intelligent look in the eye. I considered keeping the piece myself. I was glad in the end that I did not, when I saw the look of joy on the boy’s face. It occurred to me then his condition afforded him few possessions he might claim as his own.”

Scott’s painting passes through Jarrett’s family until, in 1954 it becomes the property of Martha Jackson, a New York gallery owner who exhibits bold modern paintings. She has her own secret reason for keeping the small portrait which, in due time, will unlock the equine mystery for Jess and Theo, and act as part of the powerful ending.

Knowing little about gambling or horse racing before reading Horse, I had not realised that equine paintings, such as Stubbs' famous “Whistlejacket”, are an aspect of the business of horse-breeding and were adverts promoting the best bloodlines.

Perhaps, because there are more passionate and personal novels that give a voice to the life on the plantations, Horse does not attempt to offer the reader a close inner experience. Brooks, as a white woman novelist, writes with a distanced third person narrative voice which allows her to expand her themes and also allows her concluding chapters to stand out clearly. In addition, her historical and geographical settings feel convincingly well-researched, whether she is describing families and their great estates, life on the Mississippi or the horrors of the American civil war. I appreciated the contrast between Jarrett’s time, the easy academic life within the museums and galleries and the edgy emotions within Jackson Pollock and the art scene of 50’s New York.

While I did not entirely love Horse, I did love Jarrett as a character, and I enjoyed the care and balance within Brook’s storytelling. I welcomed the world that the novel introduced me to, and the strength of its still-relevant messages. Yes: well worth the read.

Horse is published by Little, Brown.