Novel of the week Francesca Carington
Hannah Rothschild’s first novel, The Improbability
of Love, was an art-world satire and rattling good read. Coming from the chair of trustees at the National Gallery, as she was then, it was an insider-y romp that won Rothschild a place on the shortlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
With her second novel, she turns to the aristocracy. Nosy readers may look for scraps of gossip about the author’s own family, but the Trelawneys of Trelawney Castle bear little resemblance to the Rothschilds – mainly because they’re broke.
Trelawney Castle in Cornwall has been home to the Earls of Trelawney for 800 years. It has a room for every day of the year, four miles of hallways and 11 radiators. After years of bad management, affairs and subsequent payouts, it’s 2008, and the castle is a wreck.
Kitto, the useless heir, thinks of it as “a beautiful toy without batteries included”. His awful parents, the Earl and Countess, shiver in black tie in unheated rooms, saying things like: “We are not and never will be most of the British population”, while Kitto’s doormat wife Jane struggles to keep the place running.
The book is uneven in tone, pivoting between interludes with a farcically crass banker called Thomlinson Sleet (“Real men don’t need liquidity”), tranches of lyrical nature writing and more straightforward realism.
It can be baggy, too – with so many characters to juggle, Rothschild snoozes some subplots for significant amounts of time. But it’s a satisfying read, with plenty of good one-liners, and a refreshing take on the “prison of inheritance” raw deal faced by most fictional aristocrats. Kitto’s estranged sister, Blaze, wants the crumbling castle to “stand as a cautionary tale of what happened to aristocrats who failed to work and overlooked the realities of change and progress”. But in a sly twist, it’s the Countess, the least evolved member of the family, who ends up prospering the most.