The House at Riverton
by Kate Morton
Richard & Judy is one of the top-ranked chat shows in the UK. When they started to run a reading club, sales through bookstores surged, particularly when WH Smiths and Waterstones threw their promotional efforts behind them. Since then a number of similar schemes have been launched, disproving the theory that people no longer read. In the case of Richard & Judy, the books are short-listed by a third-party company and then members of the public give their opinions on TV. Previous years have seen Booker prize short-lists such as David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas alongside unknown Afghan novelists.
One side-effect of this is the success of fine novels such as Kate Morton’s The House at Riverton, published by Pan Macmillan. This has allowed first novelists to gain valuable exposure for fine novels that would otherwise disappear. Kate Morton is an Australian and this is her first novel.
The House at Riverton opens with a dream, of events that occurred in 1924, but seen from nearly seventy-five years later. Because it is a dream, the events are untrue, the significance of which is not immediately clear to the reader.
For even at the end of the last century, Doctor Grace Bradley, retired archeologist and grandmother to Marcus -- best-selling crime novelist – and before that, wife to John and mother to Ruth, and before even that lady’s maid to Hannah, has kept a secret. These aggregations of Grace’s life are important, for they show the distance she has traveled, and still kept to herself the truth of what happened one summer’s evening, at the Luxton’s ball.
But Grace has little time left, and while the nightmare is triggered by a letter from a film-maker who wishes to consult her about her recollection of that night for a film she is making, it is Grace’s desire to tell Marcus the truth that eventually persuades her to tell her story.
So even as Grace and Ursula, the film director, grow to know one another in the dying months of the 1990s, so Grace reverts to 1914, and her arrival at Riverton house as a frightened young house-maid. The illegitimate daughter of a former servant at the house, her mother has imprinted on her that she will get no second chance.
Servants were all but invisible then to those ‘above stairs’ and in time Grace learns of the Hartford sisters; Hannah who is fourteen at the novel’s opening, Emmeline ten, and their sixteen-year-old brother, David.
When David finally goes off to war, Grace becomes a confidante to Hannah. Grace’s secret vice is Sherlock Holmes, and one day she is able to buy a second-hand copy of the latest Sherlock Holmes novel from the local peddler. Hannah too has a secret; she wishes to get a job, unheard of, when women did not even have the vote. When she sees Grace, she mistakenly believes that Grace has also been taking shorthand lessons, and Grace is too shy to correct her. It is a simple misunderstanding that will have catastrophic consequences…
The House at Riverton is one of the finest novels to be endorsed by Richard & Judy’s book club, and its rich, dark, multi-faceted story that weaves backwards and forwards across the twentieth century and lingers long in the memory after the book has been closed for the last time. It is without doubt one of the finest novels of recent years.
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