From Sadie Jones, a comedy of manners
How to describe The Uninvited Guests? Well, that’s part of the fun. Sadie Jones’s outstanding new novel starts out by offering mischievous echoes of Downton Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs – tempered, however, by a somewhat unsentimental vision of a decaying Edwardian England foolishly complacent in its sense of privilege and entitlement. But by the end, we have landed somewhere else: in a surrealistic universe reminiscent of filmmaker Luis Bunuel at his most unsettling. Also, let it be noted, in an eerily convincing ghost story.
Jones continues to surprise. Her award-winning first novel, The Outsider, created a stir in 2007 by lifting the lid off domestic violence in the England of the 1950s. She then set herself a trickier task with Small Wars in 2009, seizing on the forgotten conflict that Britain fought in Cyprus a half century ago, and brilliantly evoking the sensibility of that era within the context of a harrowing domestic drama, which engulfs a military family stationed on the island.
Those books signalled the arrival of a striking new British novelist with a readiness to tackle daunting material. What they did not indicate, until this latest came along, was a talent for comedy. And not just comedy, but something more rarefied – the comedy of manners, the genre so adroitly practised by the likes of Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh and, most recently, Julian Fellowes, in his scripts for Downton Abbey.
As Jones confidently leads us into the upper-middle-class milieu of Sterne House, a crumbling 18thcentury manor, and into the troubled lives of its family, she brings off scenes that are laugh-out-loud funny. Example: the ongoing saga of an artistically ambitious child named Smudge who manages to smuggle her pony Lady upstairs into her bedroom, so she can trace its “dark outlines” against the wall. This provokes one of the nar- rative’s many crises, when she resists the family’s frantic efforts to get the pony back downstairs.
Smudge is the youngest member of a family that includes older brother Clovis, who is in a permanent rage over his widowed mother Charlotte’s remarriage to a one-armed lawyer. There’s also 20-year-old Emerald, who has awakened on this eventful day to the excitement of her birthday celebration, planned for that evening.
Luis Bunuel’s films relished the spectacle of dinner parties that go nightmarishly wrong, but they have nothing on what happens here, when word of an appalling train tragedy reaches the family, along with a mysterious request from some unnamed railway official that the survivors be temporarily accommodated at Sterne.
These wayward victims, dazed and carrying a faint odour of decay, have been ominously dispatched into this class-conscious household, which grudgingly deposits them in an unused wing of the house. Once there, they are essentially abandoned – because, after all, they are unwanted third-class travellers – until their pathetic pleas for food, drink and attention can no longer be ignored. These uninvited guests serve as eerie catalysts to Jones’s darkening social comedy.
Sadie Jones is a stunningly original writer. The Uninvited Guests is her best book yet.