Jonathan Coe’s gloomy new novel will surprise fans of The Rotters’ Club and What a Carve-Up!, but it need not disappoint them. In taking on the voice of Rosamond, an elderly, suicidal lesbian, Coe shows an admirable refusal to be pigeonholed.
Like many contemporary novelists (Penelope Lively, Thomas Keneally, Alan Judd), Coe is concerned with the emotional dislocation caused by the second world war and its impact on succeeding generations. In common with these novelists, he chiefly concerns himself with the lives of women, with the domestic aftermath of the experience of upheaval and loss.
Aged eight, Rosamond is evacuated from Birmingham, torn away from her best friend and first-love prototype Gracie, who is ‘whisked away … to the unknown, darkening world outside.’ Rosamond is billeted on an unwelcoming family of rural cousins. Drowning in loneliness, she latches onto the older, charismatic, damaged Beatrix.
They become ‘blood-sisters’; a pattern of destructive manipulation is established from which Rosamond never completely breaks free.
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