Fiction:The suicide of one member is at the core of a powerful novel about a damaged family, writes Claire Kilroy
Jonathan Coe's new novel begins with news of a death. Aunt Rosamond has passed away. Her funeral is small. Rosamond was 73 years old, a marginalised figure, solitary and childless. She lived out her final days in a secluded old house in Shropshire, in occasional contact with her relations, none of whom really knew her.
Her nephew-in-law is in fact relieved when he hears that Rosamond is dead. He had feared that it was one of his children. The evocation of understandable if inglorious emotions of this nature is key to the power of Jonathan Coe's seventh novel - you can hardly blame the nephew-in-law's relief, despite it being inappropriate.
Rosamond's body was discovered sitting amongst photograph albums, a microphone in her hand. The record button on her tape deck was depressed. Gill, her niece, finds four cassettes waiting for her in Rosamond's home, accompanied by a note. "Gill -" it reads, "These are for Imogen. If you cannot find her, listen to them yourself." An empty bottle of Diazepam and a tumbler of whisky is near the body.
Imogen is a relative of Gill and Rosamond. For reasons which are revealed as the novel unfolds, neither woman has seen Imogen since she was a child. When Gill fails to trace Imogen, she listens to the tapes herself. Rosamond recorded them to tell Imogen about her birth family, from whom she was separated at the age of three: "What I want you to have, Imogen, above all, is a sense of your own history; a sense of where you come from, and of the forces that made you. It seems to me that without such a sense you are at a great disadvantage. And that this in itself is compounded by your other disadvantages." Imogen is blind.
WHAT A COMPELLING figure Imogen is. She first appears in the novel as a small blonde child at Rosamond's 50th birthday party - "the very fact of her blindness seemed to draw the other guests to her. They were drawn through sympathy, at first, and then by the strange quality of stillness, of centredness, that seemed to surround the small, fair-haired child. She was very calm." After this first appearance, Imogen is conspicuous by her absence. Her vulnerability makes the reader anxious for her. In a world as melancholy as Rosamond's, serenity such as Imogen's cannot subsist.
Imogen's blindness notwithstanding, Rosamond explains the family history to her by describing 20 illustrative photographs. The first photograph is of Rosamond and her cousin, Beatrix - Imogen's grandmother and Rosamond's first crush. Beatrix is a damaged, capricious child who capitalises on Rosamond's fascination with her by conscripting her younger cousin into her unending (and fruitless) quest to get what she wants.
Rosamond, too, is a damaged child, evacuated during the war and thus effectively parentless. The damage inflicted by the failure of care is one of the novel's central preoccupations. Most of the characters were neglected by their parents, or abandoned by them, or separated from them. The neglect runs down the family line, and Imogen, beautiful, blind, fragile Imogen, is the culmination. "You were inevitable," Rosamond tells her. "Everything that led up to you was wrong . . . but everything about you is right."
The chief part of the text consist of the transcription of Rosamond's tapes. Her voice is beautifully achieved, and deeply affecting. Rosamond's complexity expands and ramifies with the description of each seemingly innocent photograph. Each shot is dissected, revealing the pathology behind the apparently happy faces. "I know that everybody smiles for photographs," Rosamond says, "that's one of the reasons you should never trust them." Rosamond's narration is a meditation on the fleeting nature of happiness. "There is nothing one can say, I suppose, about happiness," she tells Imogen '. . . except the certain knowledge that it will have to come to an end." As the photographs clock up, Rosamond's time runs out. The solemn, restrained, ever-circling quality of her introspections, and of her ascription of significance to specific places at specific points in time, as if on some level they still existed in the ether and could thus be returned to, recalls the work of WG Sebald, who also constructed his narratives around photographs, and around lost souls desperate to forge connections with what's been taken from them.
ROSAMOND'S OVERPOWERING DESIRE to love these insufficiently loved children is immensely poignant, but possibly informed more by her own needs than those of the children - "I was hungry for closeness," she says. As a gay woman, she has no children of her own, despite dearly wanting them. That is her great tragedy. She speaks of not wishing to impose herself on Imogen's family, of not wanting to "appear too pushy", but her attentions are often unwelcome. A suggestion of improbity concerning Rosamond and Thea - Imogen's disaffected mother - is left hanging in the air. Is the incident sinister? Will Imogen really benefit from learning of her damaged antecedents? Or from listening to her great-aunt commit suicide on tape? Coe confronts the reader with such questions.
After Rosamond's suicide, the novel deteriorates in tone and plot for the last few pages, shifting from melancholy to melodrama, from WG Sebald to Alice Sebold. The weak ending doesn't destroy the spell of Rosamond's voice, but rather casts it into relief, as if in illustration of the novel's central tenet: that nothing good lasts forever, or even for very long.
Claire Kilroy's second novel, Tenderwire, is published by Faber
The Rain Before It Falls By Jonathan Coe Viking, 278pp. £17.99