FINISHED READING - A Change of Climate by Hilary Mantel

I readily devoured Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy. They satisfied the history nerds need to have someone put human flesh on the unfeeling dry bones of historical fact. I've never read any of her earlier novels, for which she was also much lauded. I found a second hand copy of A Change of Climate in the Blickling bookshop, and thought to give one a try. With no idea whether or not this was a good one to start with.

The book opens with a drama, being clearly remembered of a visitor to the house slitting their wrists. It took place in The Red House, where Ralph and Anna live. A couple who have spent their lives trying to do good, and to be if help to those in misfortune. Their relationship is loving, but there is an air of something in it that is stale. In these early chapters of the novel, there is a lot of foreshadowing of the past and the future. Ralph's sister Emma is in mourning, for her adulterous lover Felix has recently died. Ralph appears to be the only one not to have clocked this. Though it has been going on for nearly a lifetime. But then the Eldred family, Ralph and Anna in particular, have their own hidden secrets never talked of even amongst close family. One is left to wonder what exactly they are. They appear to be located in Ralph and Anna's time doing missionary work in South Africa. This is all we know.

The rest of the novel slowly reveals what the nature of that secret is. Why few know or are willing to talk of it. Only as another adulterous relationship forms and a sense of double betrayal erupts, does the corrosive nature of keeping that secret unveil itself. An incident over which there has never been any closure, just an enforced desiccated silence. This appears, on the surface at least, to be one of those novels set in a middle class milieu, with middle class concerns and preoccupations. Because the novel spends so much of its time pootling about in the Eldred families worthy dynamic, I did lose patience with it at times, to put a bit more grist to this tale soon. But once one reaches that point of revelation, it does this well, and leaves you, after it cascades towards its end, with an unravelled, open ended type of conclusion. A good, but not a great novel.

CARROT REVIEW - 4 /8