LITERARY FICTION
THE HOUSE ON FRIPP ISLAND by Rebecca Kauffman (Serpent’s Tail £12.99, 336 pp)
YOU know someone will be dead by the end of Kauffman’s suspenseful chiller, but the tension derives not so much from the question of who, as from the novel’s furtive atmospherics.
Lisa and Scott are on holiday for a week with Lisa’s old school friend Poppy and her husband John, who are as poor and content as Lisa and Scott are wealthy and miserable. The weather is hot, there are alligators in the swamp and Lisa is on edge after discovering that a local handyman is on the sex offenders’ register.
The children, meanwhile, are in their own bubbles — Lisa’s 14-year-old daughter Rae is an unhappy mass of broiling hormones, while Poppy’s 17-year-old son Ryan is disconcertingly laid-back and inscrutable.
While the fault lines between Scott and Lisa allow for plenty of tart observations on marital disenchantment, Kaufmann spins a secondary, far more disconcerting story about the toxic power of suspicion and rumour. A smart summer read.
PILGRIMS by Matthew Kneale (Atlantic £16.99, 352 pp)
A RIGHT ramshackle bunch populates Matthew Kneale’s latest novel, set in medieval England. There’s Tom, son of Tom, a wretched lad intent on saving the soul of his dead cat from purgatory. There’s Sir John, a boorish landlord sulkily seeking forgiveness for punching an abbot. There’s a humble tailor whose daughter often speaks in the voice of God himself.
They and others are on a pilgrimage from Oxford to Rome, and most take it in turn to narrate a chapter or two as the pilgrims slowly limp their way across France, at one point seeking shelter in a nunnery, causing some of the chaps to briefly part ways with their trousers.
There’s a lot of superstitious talk and multiple anecdotes concerning sex, or swiving, as it was called back then.
Alas, far too much exposition, as characters provide lengthy back stories, and a muddling of narrative voices — to the extent it’s often impossible to distinguish one from another — sap the energy. And the clamour of medieval England never feels properly bedded into the writing.
It’s a long old journey, that’s for sure.
BELOW DECK by Sophie Hardcastle (Allen & Unwin £10, 304 pp)
OLI is in her early 20s when she abandons a career in finance to spend four life-changing weeks on a boat sailing the Australian coast with a much older couple who quickly become her dearest friends.
Four years on and, fully immersed in a life at sea, she signs on as the only woman in a crew sailing to New Zealand. The atmosphere sours, and she is subsequently humiliated, abused and raped.
Partly because she didn’t scream out during the worst of these moments, the experience seems to stain her very blood. It’s only years later, on a trip to Antarctica with a group of female artists, that she feels able to be free.
Hardcastle’s debut novel for adults indulges some over-familiar tropes on the subject of feminine solidarity and her clumsy virtue-signalling can be tiresome. But her prose is often consolingly gorgeous, combining Oli’s synesthesia and innate empathy with the elements to mesmeric effect.