164 The Australian Women’s Weekly | OCTOBER 2019
Reading
room
Edited by ROWENA MARAFamilydramaHistorical novelist Philippa Gregory has
moved on from the royal court of Tudor
times (The Other Boleyn Girl/The Boleyn
Inheritance) to the mid-1600s and a
small settlement on the tidal Sussex
coastline. Civil war has sent papist
King Charles I into exile and the clashes
between Protestants and Catholics
have affected even the most isolated
communities. The heroine here is Alinor
Reekie, an impoverished mother of two
whose brutish fi sherman husband has
disappeared, possibly to his death on
the stormy seas. But with no body to
confi rm this, Alinor’s status is neither
wife nor widow – a precarious position
as a woman with no man to defi ne
her. Coupled with this, her work as
a herbalist and midwife carries the
dangerous suspicion of witchcraft. Life
is tough, food scarce, and her son Rob
and daughter Alys must also work hard
to help support the family. Despite her
hardship, Alinor is a good, kind woman,
and when a Catholic priest crosses her
path one moonlit night, she doesn’t
hesitate to lead him to a safe hiding
place. It’s an encounter that will
inexorably change the direction of
her family’s life. Setting the scene for
Gregory’s new series, Tidelands is rich
in the small details of day-to-day life
in this era, moving in pace with the
tides of the title. It’s not until near the
end that the momentum picks up, but
the dramatic climax will leave you
hungering for more. RMTidelands
by Philippa Gregory, HarperCollinsThe Dutch House
by Ann Patchett,
Bloomsbury.
Review by Juliet RiedenAnn Patchett’s genius is in
putting families and their
fragile intimacy under the
microscope. In The Dutch
House, this unique author is
at the height of her powers
with a tale you won’t want
to put down.
The novel opens with eight-year-old
Danny Conroy and his sister, Maeve, 15,
meeting Andrea, the woman who will
become their stepmother. Andrea is taken
with the impressive and opulent family
home with its overblown portraits of its
original Dutch owners and their ancestors.
Her own Dutch heritage affords Andrea
an ominous ownership of this striking and
emotionally chilly home and, in no time,
she slips in and takes over. “After her fi rst
appearance at the Dutch House, Andrea
lingered like a virus,” notes our excellent
narrator, Danny, who tells his story as an
adult, looking back.
The house in Elkins Park, Philadelphia,
was purchased in 1946 by Danny and
Maeve’s Brooklyn-born father, Cyril
Conroy, complete with the furnishings
and staff of its previous owners, including
a servant girl named Fluffy. Having madetheir fortune distributing
cigarettes to soldiers, the
original family had built the
home on a decadent scale
and set it in vast grounds.
But when the Depression
hit they were forced to sell
off parcels of land until
passersby could peer in
through the giant windows.
One of Cyril’s few
additions is a painting he
commissioned. It was
supposed to be a portrait
of his fi rst wife, Elna, but
when the artist arrived she refused to sit
for him and instead he painted Maeve.
Elna, who’d hated the house, unable to
conscience its extravagance, had walked
out when Danny was three and Maeve 10.
When Andrea comes knocking, Cyril
doesn’t seem all that interested but lacks
“the means to deal with her tenacity”,
according to Danny.
So she moves in, bringing her two
daughters, one smiley, one serious, and
everything changes for Maeve, who is
by then studying maths in New York,
and Danny, who ends up at prestigious
college Choate, followed by Columbia.
The plot spirals off in intriguing directions
as Patchett applies more layers to the
characterisation. One of the richest
characters is the house itself and by
the end it’s this extraordinary place
you miss most.About e au or
Ann Patchett, 55, was born in Los Angeles and raised in Nashville,
Tennessee, where she still lives with her husband, Karl VanDevender,
and dog Sparky. Ann’s childhood involved “regular upheaval – divorce,
cross-country move, poverty, remarriage, wealth, another divorce. That
said, I was well cared for. I think it was probably an excellent childhood for a
novelist.” Now a multi-award winner, she was once named one of the 100 most
infl uential people in the world by Time magazine. The Dutch House is her eighth novel.Historical epic