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Overview
As a young girl, Rosamond is sent to Shropshire to escape the Blitz. Here, in the countryside, she forms a close bond with her older cousin, Beatrix, a young woman haunted by anger and resentment.Sixty years later, just before her death, Rosamond records her memories on cassettes, addressing them to a distant cousin—a near stranger-named Imogen. As Gill, her beloved niece, listens to these tapes, a heart—stopping family saga is revealed. In this masterful portrait of three generations of woman, Jonathan Coe exposes the profound reserves of hope and loss within the lives of ordinary woman.
Synopsis
Following The Rotters’ Club and its sequel, The Closed Circle, Jonathan Coe now offers his first stand-alone novel in a decade, a story of three generations of women whose destinies reach from the English countryside in World War II to London, Toronto, and southern France at the turn of the new century.
Evacuated to Shropshire during the Blitz, eight-year-old Rosamond forged a bond with her cousin Beatrix that augured the most treasured and devastating moments of her life. She recorded these memories sixty years later, just before her death, on cassettes she bequeathed to a woman she hadn’t seen in decades. When her beloved niece, Gill, plays the tapes in hopes of locating this unwitting heir, she instead hears a family saga swathed in promise and betrayal: the story of how Beatrix, starved of her mother’s affection, conceived a fraught bloodline that culminated in heart-stopping tragedy—its chief victim being her own granddaughter. And as Rosamond explores the ties that bound these generations together and shaped her experience all along, Gill grows increasingly haunted by how profoundly her own recollections—not to mention the love she feels for her grown daughters, listening alongside her—are linked to generations of women she never knew.
A stirring, masterful portrait of motherhood and family secrets, The Rain Before It Falls is also a meditation on the tapestries we weave out of the past, whether transcendent or horrific. Hailed by the Los Angeles Times for his “sustained, intricate brilliance,” Jonathan Coe once again proves himself “an artist of character and of hischaracters’ stories,” here more astutely than ever before.
The Barnes & Noble Review
Halfway through Jonathan Coe's haunting novel The Rain Before It Falls, Rosamond, the elderly narrator, recalls a summer day in 1949 when she and her teenage cousin acted as extras in Gone to Earth, a Michael Powell film that was being made in their small Shropshire town. Decades later, when it appears on television, Rosamond tapes the film. "I have watched and rewatched that fragment of videotape," she admits, referring to the crowd scene, " looking for meaning in those thoughtless gestures, the smiles we exchange, the raising of my hand, the turn of Beatrix's head as she looks away and smiles into the distance, restless, independent."
Editorials
Frances Taliaferro
Coe won't allot more lyricism to a character than she can handle, and Rosamond remains the most prosaic member of her family. Yet there is beauty in her narrative, often in her descriptions of timeless landscapes, and there's a depth of human understanding. How interesting, then, that the force of Rosamond's own feelings, some of which she hardly acknowledges, sets the reader to wondering about her reliability as a narrator. But then, as Rosamond herself says, "family life is full of mystery," and a family history may raise as many questions as it answers. For the admiring reader, the question may be whether The Rain Before It Falls is a diversion for Jonathan Coe, or whether it quietly announces a new direction.—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
In the latest from acclaimed London novelist Coe (The Rotter's Club), the story of two cousins' friendship is keyed to a hatred that is handed down from mother to daughter across generations, as in a Greek tragedy. Evacuated from London to her aunt and uncle's Shropshire farm, Rosamond bonds with her older cousin, Beatrix, who is emotionally abused by her mother. Beatrix grows up to abuse her daughter, Thea (in one unforgettable scene, Beatrix takes a knife and flies after Thea after Thea has ruined a blouse), with repercussions that reach the next generation. All of this is narrated in retrospect by an elderly Rosamond into a tape recorder: she is recording the family's history for Imogene, Beatrix's granddaughter, who is blind, and whom Rosamond hasn't seen in 20 years. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Rosamond's fundamental flaw and limit is her decency, a quality Coe weaves beautifully into the Shropshire and London settings-along with violence. Through relatively narrow lives on a narrow isle, Coe articulates a fierce, emotional current whose sweep catches the reader and doesn't let go until the very end. (Mar.)
Copyright 2007Reed Business InformationThe Barnes & Noble Review
Halfway through Jonathan Coe's haunting novel The Rain Before It Falls, Rosamond, the elderly narrator, recalls a summer day in 1949 when she and her teenage cousin acted as extras in Gone to Earth, a Michael Powell film that was being made in their small Shropshire town. Decades later, when it appears on television, Rosamond tapes the film. "I have watched and rewatched that fragment of videotape," she admits, referring to the crowd scene, "...looking for meaning in those thoughtless gestures, the smiles we exchange, the raising of my hand, the turn of Beatrix's head as she looks away and smiles into the distance, restless, independent."There is an echo here of Coe's dazzling 1995 novel, The Winshaw Legacy. In that case, the narrator is obsessed and aroused by a naughty scene from a 1950s English comedy that he first saw as a child. Such yearning is a habitual state for Coe's most sympathetic characters, who are often stalled in a past conjured up by the most mundane images -- a holiday snapshot, an old movie. Indeed, a Coe novel often resembles a vintage Alec Guinness film: light as air but cunningly assembled and executed; unmistakably British in its reserve, yet unflinchingly perceptive in its portrayal of England's health, political and domestic. These qualities are wonderfully distilled in The Rain Before It Falls, perhaps the most straightforward of Coe's novels and the most quietly compassionate.
An elegiac opening chapter sets the tone. In Oxfordshire, on an autumn day, Gill and her husband, Stephen, rake leaves onto a garden bonfire. A telephone call brings word that Gill's spinster aunt, Rosamond, has died. Gill must travel to Shropshire to arrange the funeral and her aunt's affairs, leaving Stephen, who cannot accompany her, "as so often, with a sense of having obscurely failed her." We will learn more about this marriage, but only peripherally. Rosamond's past, not Gill's present, is the novel's main concern.
"If the silence of the house and its grounds seemed almost unearthly, the cold inside was even worse," Gill observes when she crosses Rosamond's threshold. "This was a dead person's house." Soon, however, Gill will hear her aunt's voice, not through the ether but on four cassette tapes that Rosamond has left with the scrawled instruction "Gill -- These are for Imogen. If you cannot find her, listen to them yourself." A letter would not have done because Imogen, the long-lost granddaughter of Rosamond's cousin Beatrix, is blind and Rosamond wants to tell her everything, to bequeath, as she puts it, "a sense of where you come from, and of the forces that made you."
When Imogen cannot be found and Gill decides to listen, Rosamond's voice takes over. The dying woman has chosen to describe 20 family photographs, beginning with a snapshot from 1938 or '39 of her childhood home in winter. "Small, unyielding, redbricked houses," Rosamond recalls of her Birmingham street, "You couldn't enjoy much of a life in them." A sifting of snow, the handlebars of her father's bicycle just visible in the narrow passageway leading to the yard, the withered branches of an apple tree overhanging that patch of poor ground -- these few details convey the hardship of wartime Britain, the cramped aspirations of a stoical generation, the comfort of home, the ache of childhood.
Through the snapshot, we enter a shell-shocked world that is further traumatized when the city's children are evacuated to the country. Lucky Rosamond is sent to live not with strangers but with her mother's sister in Shropshire. There, she and Beatrix become blood sisters, and there everything begins. A single childish escapade reveals Rosamond's susceptibility to Beatrix's power, and the resulting punishment foreshadows a greater horror. "It was the first time I had ever heard a mother speaking to her child in a voice so icy with hate," Rosamond says of her aunt, "Sadly it was not to be the last."
There is nothing gothic in the novel's suspense. We are not in the world of Ruth Rendell, not even that of Daphne du Maurier (although Rosamond could be a du Maurier heroine, the watchful innocent set down among passionate and possibly crazy narcissists). Coe can shock, but he does so quietly, incrementally. In this novel only one crime is committed, and while dreadful, it is neither titillating nor grotesque. Before that moment, damage is done with words. This is, after all, a family story.
Each chapter opens with Rosamond's description of a photograph that prompts her recollection of an episode, sometimes slight but always revealing. Hers is an unremarkable life. She is a lesbian who loses the love of her life and settles for companionship. She is a dowdy shop assistant who eventually becomes a secretary, then an editor. Above all, she is a childless woman for whom children, by chance, become a main -- but hardly a rewarding -- concern. First there is Beatrix's daughter, Thea, who is for a time raised by Rosamond; then Thea's daughter, Imogen, whom Rosamond knows all too briefly. That loss is one of many heartbreaks. As the novel advances from 1938 to the present, abandonment and disappointment accrue -- yet Rosamond's quiet voice, surely one of Coe's greatest creations, softens the blows even as it draws us further into her recollections.
Describing a photograph from the 1970s, for example, of Beatrix and baby Thea in their public housing cottage, she muses "The kitchen looks so cramped, in part, because it is dominated by your mother's enormous pram: an absurdly bulky and unwieldy vehicle, about the size of a small family car.... Thea is lying on her back in the pram...her eyes shut tight with a kind of furrowed concentration, as though sleeping is yet another one of the difficult grown-up tasks she must set herself to learn." These children -- Thea, Imogen, Rosamond herself -- must also learn to be resilient. After all, Beatrix's mother, Ivy, is a self-absorbed monster; Beatrix may be a lunatic; and Thea, the only one who pays for any failings, is both victim and perpetrator. For all its bleakness, this is a beautiful novel, with descriptions reminiscent at times of Thomas Hardy's nature poetry. Here is Shropshire, for example: "Trees black and brittle against a grey sky, like charred bones; rough stone walls fuzzy with layers of grey moss; the fields, rising and falling in gentle undulations, English and undemonstrative, and grey as the snow-heavy sky itself." Like Hardy, Coe deftly portrays the muted dramas taking place in that quiet landscape. --Anna Mundow
Anna Mundow writes "The Interview" and the "Historical Novels" columns for The Boston Globe and is a contributor to The Irish Times.