The Promise

    There is so much to enjoy and admire in Ann Weisgarber's novel The Promise (which I introduced here) that I'm just going to urge you to read it, and say little more than that.

    It is an exercise in economy and restraint: there is not a superfluous word in it, nor a misplaced one. It takes loyalty, love and longing and makes of those a very moving story of subtly shifting relationships among its three main characters, and it sets this in a real place during real events - the hurricane which hit Galveston Island off Texas in 1900 and caused huge loss of life and destruction.

    If you read that earlier post you'll see that it's about a woman fleeing the shame of a scandal who marries a widower she knew in her youth. Life in Oscar's rural home on the island is a far cry from Catherine's middle class Ohio upbringing, and her cultivated tastes and fine manners are out of place with the more rough and ready way of life on the dairy farm and in the simple wooden house. And then there's Nan, Oscar's blunt and practical housekeeper to contend with - Nan who made a promise to Oscar's late wife that she would take care of the couple's little boy, who feels she is a curse on any man she's ever cared for, and for whom Oscar is more than just an employer...

    In a dual-voiced narrative, the reader hears two sides of the story, and Ann Weisgarber lets our sympathies lie with both. "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant" is the line of Emily Dickinson's which forms an epigraph, and in a beautifully balanced process or progress of give and take, accommodation and understanding, generosity, withdrawal and personal sacrifice, her characters' relationships are shaped and re-shaped over secrets kept or discovered, truths told or withheld; and then nature takes her devastating course.

    This is a fine book, understated and sure in dialogue and idiom, spare but telling in its details, powerful in its emotional acuity. For more on the background to it, take a look at Ann's website which includes photographs of Galveston before and after the hurricane, music which features in the novel, and stories which inspired it, but then do read the book itself.