You, by new-to-me author Joanna Briscoe, is the elliptical story of two families, the Bannans and the Dahls, whose lives first intersect in Dartmoor, England in the 1970s.
Dora and Patrick Bannan have moved into a dilapidated longhouse, Wind Tor House, with their children. The house is in rough shape and soon there are various “men with foxy beards and fluty women in dresses resembling aprons” living in various outbuildings on the property, ostensibly to help with the mortgage or help fix up the property with their labour.
Cecilia, the middle child, is an adult returning to Wind Tor when the novel opens. She and her partner, Ari, and their three daughters have moved back to her childhood home to help Cecilia’s mother recover from breast cancer and to hopefully patch up a rocky relationship. But the move sends her spinning back to when she was seventeen and “slender and omnipotent and powerless.”
That’s when Cecilia first meets James Dahl, an English teacher at the local school, a bohemian place called Haye House. Cecilia feels like a misfit there; she’s a bookish, dreamy girl and “she couldn’t even pretend to relax in a school where class attendance was voluntary and children swarmed naked across the lawns.” Mr. Dahl and his wife Elizabeth have come to teach at Haye House and their arrival changes everything.
At fifteen, Cecilia is almost immediately smitten with Mr. Dahl. He’s beautiful and the two bond over a shared love of literature. Briscoe does a beautiful job of capturing those impossible feelings of longing as Mr. Dahl opens first Cecelia’s mind and then her heart.
But James is not the only Dahl making an impression. Dora is also teaching at Haye House (Wind Tor is proving impossible to maintain and she has the marketable skills) and she is as drawn to Elizabeth Dahl as her daughter is to James.
Dora couldn’t tell anyone. It was imperative. Distraction had come upon her and yet she had barely noticed its arrival, its source was so outlandish. Elizabeth Dahl, that wife, mother, new housemistress at the school – above all, that woman – was nagging at her thoughts, staining them, unsettling her.
You hops back and forth in time as the Bannan women navigate their untenable circumstances. Dora is married and her attraction to another woman is, even in the bohemian 70s, unthinkable. James is more than 20 years older than Cecilia and their relationship is fraught. Both mother and daughter keep secrets from each other, but as we all know the truth will out. Cecilia’s return to Wind Tor reveals the fault lines and complicates her already complicated life in unexpected ways.
I loved this book. The poetic writing reminded me of one of my favourite British authors, Helen Dunmore. It’s a book to savour, even though you desperately want to know how this riveting family drama is going to play out. And the ending….perfection, although it is perhaps slightly too loose-endy for some readers.
Highly recommended.
The Ludic Reader 