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The Big HouseEditions
Reviews
McEwen brilliantly captures the intensity of childhood observations and relationships. The house and its garden are brought to life with unerringly chosen details, and her emotions towards her family are absolutely convincing – her passionate attachment to her brother, her hunger for a mother who is incapable of showing love. Everything about the life of these fading landed gentry rings true. The prose is precise and beautiful, never jarring. The kind of world described in this novel is not fashionable in literature nowadays: it is traditional, very British, decadent in a rather rarefied way. But if one of the challenges of fiction is to present a world to a reader which, wherever it may be, explores the human condition honestly, then McEwen rises to it in this book as triumphantly as does E Annie Proulx in any of her tales of rural brutality. The savagery in this novel is mostly psychological, but the sense of vitality and truth is breathtaking. - review by Johnny de Falbe The adult Elizabeth, overcome by sorrow, looks back to her childhood and to her Scottish family in the 1970's. The child's voice is as convincing as that of Jane Eyre or of David Copperfield and permits us to see the serpents in this apparent Eden. A haunting, delicate first novel. - review by Karen Wadman |
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John Sandoe [Books] Ltd |
I found this short novel utterly mesmerising. Written through the eyes of a 6-year-old girl, it recounts a short period in the lives of a family of six young children who live with their parents – and numerous servants – in a large house in Scotland. It is the late sixties and the money is running out. From the start, you know that the two children closest in age to the narrator killed themselves as adults: you know that there is a “monster” in the family (it also occupies the father, in the form of drink and despair).
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