Instructions for a Heatwave

   

    July, 1976, and Maggie O'Farrell's new novel Instructions for a Heatwave begins in London's Highbury where "the heat inhabits the house like a guest who has outstayed his welcome."

    The heatwave which has been stifling Britain shows no sign of easing. In an ordinary house on a suburban street, retired bank manager Robert Riordan goes out one morning to buy a newspaper and doesn't come back. His wife Gretta can make nothing of his sudden disappearance, out of character and out of the blue, but then, "a heatwave will act upon people. It lays them bare, it wears down their guard. They start behaving not unusually but unguardedly. They act not so much out of character as deep within it."

    Gretta calls her grown-up children, but Monica has "a lot on ... something about burying a cat", Michael Francis is preoccupied as his marriage is under strain since his wife began an Open University degree and finds her fellow students more fascinating than her husband, and Aoife - well, "the less said the better. She'd gone off to America. Never called. Never wrote. Living with somebody, Gretta suspects." But nevertheless the family gathers and tries to work out why Robert has left and where he might be.

    As the enervating heat hangs around for another day and another, the cracks in the family open up under scrutiny and pressure. Old grievances are aired again and tensions from years before surface as the estranged sisters confront one another and their brother faces his own problems. As the reasons behind Robert's disappearance become clearer, the intricate mosaic that is family life gradually reveals its shape and colour.

    The story moves from London to New York and Ireland, back in time and forward again, zooming in on odd events and recollected moments, memories and reflections, past hurts and present pain. Although the emotional temperature rises, and the physical heat is ever-present, I'd have liked more of it; the weather here does not quite do what it does in L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between, say, where it acts "as pressure to the narrative, supporting it, confining it, and then building to a point at which it cannot be contained". But there is much to commend, from the humour, the social observation, the characters' histories which predict their fates all too well, and the highly engaging telling of the tale itself. Maggie O'Farrell knows what she's about.

Comments

[Claire]

This one is right at the top of my list. I don't believe I can hold off much longer!

[Cornflower]

I've had a run of good books lately, and this is certainly one of them.

[Mary (over the Pond)]

Heatwave? So hard to imagine while I look out my office window in Washington to see the snow steadily coming down. But thanks. Another for the (ever growing)TBR pile.

[Cornflower]

It's very cold here, too, and much of the country has snow. Come to think of it, I'm reading another 'hot' book at the moment, Peggy Riley's "Amity & Sorrow", and it's very good indeed.

[litlove]

I really loved The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, so would very much like to try this one. Lovely review, Karen.

[Cornflower]

Thankyou, Victoria. I greatly enjoyed The Hand that First Held Mine, too.