"The High House" by Jessie Greengrass

An audio book. Sections by Francesca, Sally and Paul. Paul's sections are much shorter. There are hints that the narrators are recounting events long ago.

Francesca had a house left to her, on high ground that's sometimes an island. It's by tidal waters. She got it repaired, made the waterwheel generate electricity, cared for the orchard. She's a famous expert on Climate Change, dashing round the world to summits. Caroline's father, a university lecturer, married her. When Caroline (Caro) is 14, Paul is born. Caroline collects him from nursery school, etc.

Sally grew up in the village by the High House, looked after by her grandfather. She studies History at University and has an interest in ecology. Francesca employs them as caretakers/gardeners.

The climate crisis is worsening. On TV they watch disasters - an island disappears. While Francesca and Caro's father are away they phone Caroline, tell her to move with Paul to the High House straight away. Next day Caro learns that her parents died in the night - a storm. When she arrives at the High House she find Sal. She discovers that Francesca has stocked a barn with food and clothes. There's a flood. The Thames Barrier is permanently up. They're isolated, precariously self-sufficient. They watch the sea and land for signs of worse things to come. There's some tension between Caro and Sal about who looks after Paul. He wants to check the egrets every day because they're over-wintering. At the end Sal's grandfather dies. The village has been abandoned so they have to bury him themselves

Too slow. Too much repetition.

Other reviews

• Melissa Harrison (Greengrass brilliantly dramatises the ways in which the simple rhythms of life with a toddler can bring comfort ... Greengrass is excellent on the complex currents that can develop between people who live in close proximity ... But as the novel jumps back and forth in time, the very gradual filling-in of information about the High House and who Sally is creates something of a slow start, while some misapprehensions about the ways in which birds are likely to respond to changing weather patterns – not to mention the fact that badgers don’t hibernate, so wouldn’t be “awake too early” – mar the picture of growing natural turmoil. And although Caro and Sally’s backstories and personalities are different, their voices aren’t)
• Gwendolyn Smith (the book is let down by its structure: two opening sections in which Caro and Sally recall their separate childhoods make for a slow, disjointed start. The writing is also patchy, hypnotic prose weighed down by exposition. Caro does not need to spell out that “Sally was a counterweight, the other half of me that Pauly needed”; the subtler passages convey that just fine. ... Character-wise, the dynamics between the protagonists are interesting, but their voices are almost indistinguishable.)

"An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It" by Jessie Greengrass (JM Originals, 2015)

Plenty of the narrators share a suave, sub-claused style - e.g. "Nor did the severity of the winters deter me. They would be hard, I knew; not casually hard, as the tedium of January in southern England is hard, with its mud and drizzle and skies like sodden newsprint, but a force in opposition, a way of being rather than a backdrop; and consequently their survival would confer the certainty of great courage, persistence and inner strength (p.37). Several are loners escaping from grief or bereavement by fantasising or staying in remote places, though we're told that "While all of these putative new lives involved escape, to claim this as their function is a reduction of their appeal to the obvious and trite. They represented I think not so much a running away as a sloughing off" (p.41). At the end they can't always re-enter the world they retreated from (see "Three thousand nine hundred and forty five miles", "On Time Travel", etc).

There's little direct speech or zooming in on significant detail. Occasionally there are phrases like "I had been forced to walk round museums of village life run by old women who smelled of camphor and digestive biscuits while my father read in a deliberate monotone every browned label on every rotting ploughshare" (p.128). More often there are contemplative summaries like "In the six months before he left things had become very close between us. We had been spending almost all of our time together, talking late into the night, and although at first this was because we enjoyed one another's company and had many things to say, by the end it seemed that almost all of our conversations had become about our situation" (p.112).

I liked "Winter, 2058" - shades of China Miéville's short stories.

In "Three thousand nine hundred and forty five miles", the narrator's lover leaves her for a few months. In isolation she copes by imagining emailing him, and interacting passively with others by listening to them, and watching them. When he returns she can't re-adapt.

"On Time Travel" was ok too. The narrator's father had suddenly died. They weren't a happy family before - "because it seemed so awful that something so obviously terrible might in some ways come as a relief, we couldn't talk about it and, unable to talk about it, couldn't talk about anything else, either" (p.18); "I think that we both felt guilt at the unhappiness of the other, and resentment too, as though our own carefully guarded sadnesses were rendered, by comparison to the other's, mean and selfish" (p.24). She detaches herself from reality, imagining detailed pasts, never catching up with the real time lost.

In "Dolphin" there's more death and retreating - the narrator (then a 9 y.o. daughter of soon-to-divorce parents) witnesses the (suicidal?) death of a dolphin at an aqua park. The audience is evacuated but she hides under the banked seating, not found by her father until the park had closed.

"Even his unhappiness felt inadequate" thinks the narrator of "The Comfort of the Dead". It's the only story with a long time-scale - 30 years or so. "In age, the fussy confines of his life began to seem appropriate: he no longer struggled between what he was and what he felt he ought to be".

There's a chance to read the title story online.

Other reviews

• Jonathan Beckman (all but three of the stories have anonymous, first-person narrators ... interiority burrowing ever inwards is what fascinates her, minds teasing out the causes of their inanition. Her mood – and, frequently, the geography of these stories – is arctic ... She takes pains, sometimes a little too forcefully, to circumvent obvious behavioural explanations. ... I wondered why Greengrass traversed and re-traversed this particular psychological terrain so remorselessly. In art as well as life, there can be something compulsive, something reassuring about fingering that which discomfits. The best story in the collection, "The Comfort of the Dead", has an expansiveness that the others lack.)
• lonesomereader (Greengrass has a startlingly beautiful way of describing her feeling of loneliness and her desire for a physical/emotional connection with strangers she sees around her.)
• Simon Savidge (Raw emotion, actually better put, basic/base emotion is always at the heart of Greengrass’ tales. ... brilliant 'All The Other Jobs'. ... my second most favourite story 'On Time Travel')
• Ross Jeffery