Unquiet dead
Helen Dunmore crafts an absorbing tale set in the age of the French Revolution and the Gothic novel.
Helen Dunmore writes of “people whose voices have not echoed through time and whose struggles and passions have been hidden from history”. Most people in all ages are like that, of course; in time their names are effaced from gravestones – if they even had such a stone. In June 1789, in the first chapter of this novel, an unnamed man is burying a woman in a forest. There will be no stone over her grave, and one suspects he murdered her.
It is a gripping opening and it will not be long before we know who the man is.
The date is significant. The French Revolution is about to break out, to be greeted with enthusiasm by English radicals. The novel is set in Bristol but events in France cast their shadow over its characters. The narrator and heroine, Lizzie, is the beloved and loving daughter of Julia, a radical writer and early feminist, now married to her second husband, Augustus, a kindly but ineffectual idealist. Lizzie is married to John Diner Tredevant, and is herself a second wife. Diner, as she calls him, has nothing in common with her family. He is a self-made man, a builder, ambitious and visionary, engaged on the construction of a magnificent terrace in Clifton overlooking a deep river gorge. Lizzie’s family talk; Diner acts. They are generous and welcoming; he is secretive and possessive. They welcome the Revolution; he detests and fears it. For them it opens the promise of a new age; for Diner, working on borrowed money, it carries the threat of upheaval, war, depression and bankruptcy. Lizzie is caught between two worlds, her loyalties divided. Moreover, while she is passionately in love with Diner, who resents her family and is distrusted by them, she will also come to fear him. She begins to suspect that there are dark, alarming things in his past. Moreover, if her mother preached of the rights of women, Diner wants to dominate her and control all aspects of her life. Yet he is also capable of moments of beguiling tenderness.
This is a historical novel and a very good one. The characters truly belong to their time and place. The influence of the Revolution as it careers from the optimistic idealism of its early days, when the Declaration of the Rights of Man was published and “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”, to the bloody horror of the September Massacres of 1792 and the Terror, is faithfully and persuasively