Novel of the week Francesca Carington
Best known for the dreamy teenage cousin-romance
How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff is a rare writer of young adult fiction who is also loved by grownups. Her ninth novel, The Great
Godden, is just as marvellous, and sure to have crossover appeal again. The unnamed (and indeterminately gendered) narrator spends each summer en famille, with four siblings, in a turreted house by the sea. Round the corner are their cousin Hope and her fiancé Mal, both in their early 30s, and “ring-leaders in all things summery – drunkenness, indiscreet conversations, all night poker”. When the two sons of a famous actress come to stay with Hope, the stage is set for a summer of intrigue.
The elder of the two brothers, an aspiring actor, is Kit, cool and sexy, “a kind of golden Greek statue of a youth”; the younger is Hugo, moody and mysterious, with the gift of “selective invisibility”. The boys loathe each other. Everyone loves Kit. Kit takes up with the narrator’s narcissistic and beautiful sister Mattie – but soon his eye wanders over to the narrator, too. In other words, a classic summer, comingof-age story, wonderfully done.
Rosoff’s adolescent narrator is spot on: from jabs at the younger siblings (one of them “never helps”) to the silent confusion of teenage lust (“I didn’t want to look as if I didn’t understand the rules”). There’s an intriguing tension between the narrator’s namelessness and the fervent (and quintessentially teenage) insistence on their own uniqueness – especially when it comes to relations with Kit, who “came to me for something tangled, dark, compelling”. To the narrator, love is a form of self-affirmation, a recognition of the “you you’ve always secretly believed in, the you that inspired longing and delight, the you no one else really noticed before”.
Not all of it holds up, like Kit’s characterisation as an 18-year-old Don Juan, but so what? Its hazy nostalgia tempered by a winning self-awareness, The Great Godden is a joyful, generous read.