Susan Fletcher's novel Corrag* is a book which for good reason - as that post on it shows - left a lasting impression. I've just read Susan's latest, House of Glass, drawn to it by its subject matter: a country house with a large and beautiful garden, a young woman invited there to establish a glasshouse full of plants from Kew, an absent owner, secrets, lies, loss ...
It is a story which stands in the tradition of Jane Eyre or Rebecca, one which wrong-foots the reader - and chills them, builds a complex, intricate picture of lives based on false assumptions, lives constrained by others' misdeeds. It's a book of illusions, of faded colours, and broken dreams.
Set in 1914, it's narrated by Clara Waterfield, a young woman who has just lost her mother, and whose life thus far has been circumscribed by osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease. Having been sequestered for fear of fractures, Clara is unworldly; forthright, but remote, outspoken, unused to the society of anyone beyond her small family circle. Now seeking solace, she becomes a regular visitor to Kew Gardens and forms an acquaintance with Forbes, the foreman of the glasshouses, who slakes her sudden thirst for botanical knowledge and in time passes on not just knowledge but an invitation. A Mr. Fox wishes to buy plants from Kew to fill his Gloucestershire glasshouse, but he asks, too, for a person, someone to bed in his new collection and care for it in the first weeks of its establishment; Forbes encourages Clara to accept the position. So she travels to Shadowbrook, to the newly built glasshouse, set in a garden of many 'rooms'**, to a house whose owner is away but whose walls echo with the voices of the past.
Reading what follows is like waiting in a room of hot, still air, thick with motes of dust drifting in a slowly shifting shaft of sunlight, for it has that almost stifling intensity to it, so atmospheric is it. Susan Fletcher achieves this through a deep connection to her material - there is nothing sketchy about her writing, nothing superficial or unconsidered, rather I sense her moulding every scene, every line, like working clay, feeling its form, shaping and re-shaping at fingertip level. Here and there it veers towards the precious and the mannered, and an editor might have pulled it back a little, but that's a small criticism of what is essentially fine work. On a broader level, though some might call elements of the plot overly involved or contrived, it is a beautifully crafted book, and like Corrag, will stay in the mind.
*Also known as Witch Light.
**Inspired by Hidcote.
