FictionTessa Hadley's new novel subscribes to the Ian McEwan school of show-stopping openings. Kate Flynn, an urbane, attractive, 43-year-old university lecturer, has ditched her London life and is driving home to Cardiff to take care of her elderly mother, when a swan drops out of the sky and lands on the bonnet of the car in front of her.
"It threw out one long wing, dazzling white feathers ranged in rows of perfect symmetry, lit up by headlights. Then the mess was thrown free onto the road, and swallowed up in the advancing chaos."
Hadley has an eye for arresting images, and the faculty with language to evoke them.
Kate takes up residence in her childhood home, Firenze, an eccentric old mansion which houses the eponymous master bedroom in which both Kate and her octogenarian mother, Billie, who is showing the early signs of senility, were born. Both of them avoid this room, uncomfortable with the intimacy it symbolises.
Kate is quickly reabsorbed into her old life. Many of her childhood friends still live locally. She develops an attraction for David Roberts, her best friend's brother, now on to his second marriage, which, since the swan incident, is not going too well. David's wife, Suzie, was driving the car that was hit by the swan, and the event has detonated an instability in her. Suzie suspects that the swan was on some level the spirit of David's first wife, Francesca, who committed suicide in her twenties.
Francesca and David's son, Jamie, falls in love with Kate, and the pair embark on a torrid affair, though Jamie is a 17-year-old schoolboy. Kate is in love with Jamie's father, David, who is in love with Kate. The novel reaches its climax when David walks in on Kate and Jamie. All hell breaks loose. Except that it doesn't. David gets back into his car and drives home. Another swan may or may not fall out of the sky and hit his car, but it's a minor event compared to the opening. "David was lucky to have got out of such a tangle," we are told.
The novel suffers from an evasive use of compressed time. Suddenly, it's next week, then it's next year. This technique, as Hadley applies it, detracts from key incidents as it simply abandons them. Refusing to fully examine the aftermaths of major events is the equivalent of saying "Anyway", and changing the subject any time it gets tricky.
The Master Bedroom is a very polite novel. It is at times crippled by politesse. There are lots of exclamations of delight and displays of cheerful irony. Kate refuses to engage with anything messy or "earthbound", real life being "too awfully ugly". "I used to be a feminist, of course," Kate informs those assembled at a dinner party. "Everyone goes through a phase. But now I'm glad men rule the world. Who wants to, anyway. What a bore."
To have a relentlessly witty and dismissive protagonist who is constrained by a horror of that which is not cerebral is not in itself a flaw, providing the author is not similarly constrained. The primary limitation with Hadley's writing is that too many things - people's feelings, moral dilemmas, personal crises - are treated with this sophisticated, reductive, almost lofty disregard. If events are narrated in a persistently oblique manner, the focus of attention is refracted into infinity, and nothing is directly contemplated. And thus nothing hits home. It is like motorway driving. Few landmarks. Repetitive.
Except that not everything in this novel is like motorway driving. Hadley does occasionally free herself of her brittle restraints to allow her prose swell to a genuinely affecting emotional and artistic pitch, as when Kate's frail, bewildered mother wanders into the forbidden master bedroom to find her middle-aged daughter in bed with a boy young enough to be her great-grandson. In her confusion and dismay, she says: "Mama? . . . Mutti? . . . Are you here? Is it you?" Hadley can reach those intimate, upsetting, important places, but mostly chooses to politely avoid them. Sometimes, you need to roll your sleeves up.
Claire Kilroy's last novel, Tenderwire, is published by Faber
The Master Bedroom By Tessa Hadley Jonathan Cape, 309pp. £16.99