The whizz-kid of Oz
The Lake House Kate Morton (Pan Macmillan, R285)
KATE Morton has been called everything from an “old-fashioned writer” and a writer of “books about families” to Australia’s “reigning queen of gothic fiction”. The author admits that her intricately plotted, intelligently crafted, outsized novels are hard to categorise.
“Even after a decade of writing, I still find it hard to put into words what kind of genre they are,” says Morton, who, inside of that decade and on the back of just four novels, has become Australia’s bestselling international author. “People sometimes say I’m an historical novelist, but I don’t feel like that. I love history but my interest in it as a writer isn’t in history as something that happened long ago. For me, it has to be tethered to the present because that’s how I see it, that the past is still with us.”
The past leaks into the present in a myriad unexpected and potent ways in her new and fifth novel, The Lake House, where the secrets of one generation shadow those of the next. Set in Cornwall, it is seamed around the twin mysteries of a baby boy who goes missing during a midsummer party on a sprawling estate in 1933, and of a young mother who goes missing 70 years later from a London flat.
Intricately layered and richly evocative, it deploys many of the familiar gothic themes that characterise Morton’s previous novels — an abandoned house, mysterious secrets, repetitions and “doubles” in various forms — and takes up her fascination with the social repercussions of war and, in this case, shell shock. Yet The Lake House tilts more consciously towards the mystery genre than her previous works, in both its elegant Russian dolllike construction and its featuring of both a young woman detective, Sadie Barrow, and an elderly mystery writer, Alice Edevane, as key protagonists.
For Morton, who is an avid observer of the world around her and a compulsive note-taker, “many thousands of little ideas have to come together in the right way to form a novel”. The Lake House seeded itself when her long-time obsession with the unsolved Australian case of the missing Beaumont children — three siblings aged four, seven and nine who disappeared from a beach in 1966 — collided with a story that made headlines in 2013, of a Parisian apartment that had been abandoned in 1940 and rediscovered in all its dusty Belle Epoch glory 70 years later. Even then, it wasn’t until a chance conversation made her realise that abandoned houses exist all over the English countryside, “that it all just came together. It’s like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that fit together because they’re the right hue, and suddenly you see part of the picture.”
Morton talks candidly about the almost “physical pull” of the past and of sensations and ideas that lure her to the page. She refers to a sensation of “narrative rightness” when writing. “It’s a very hard thing to describe, it’s like the hairs standing up on your neck. It’s quite a bodily knowing — you’re not trying to force things together and make it up.” Yet she is reluctant to contemplate the phenomenal popularity of her novels for fear of “going down an avenue of self-focus”.
For Morton, writing is about remaining true to her instincts in reaching beyond pure escapism towards that “magical transaction where black print turns into a world that is rich and full and that people can live and breathe inside”.