Customer Reviews

The Rain Before It Falls (Isis General Fiction)

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The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward." That observation might well serve as the epigraph for Jonathan Coe's somber and moving story of the toll emotional estrangement exacts on the women of one otherwise unremarkable British family.

THE RAIN BEFORE IT FALLS opens in 2006, when Gill learns of the death of her ailing spinster Aunt Rosamond in a small Shropshire village. After Rosamond's funeral, the task of sifting through the belongings left behind in her cottage falls to her niece. Next to her aunt's chair she makes a disturbing find: the remains of a tumbler of malt whisky, alongside an empty bottle of Diazepam. Equally startling is her discovery of four cassette tapes and a piece of paper bearing the words "Gill --- These are for Imogen. If you cannot find her, listen to them yourself."

That brief introduction provides the frame for the balance of the novel, most of which consists of the playing of the tapes, as Rosamond patiently and painstakingly describes for a young girl named Imogen --- blinded in an accident at age three --- the stories surrounding 19 carefully chosen snapshots and one portrait, while Gill and her adult daughters sit transfixed, listening to the story, "the gradual unveiling of their family's occult, unsuspected history."

Rosamond's account begins in 1941 when, like many of the children residing in England's cities, she has evacuated to the countryside --- in her case Warden Farm, owned by her aunt and uncle --- where she quickly develops a close relationship with her cousin Beatrix, three years her senior. The two girls seal their bond as "blood sisters" on the night of a poorly planned escape from the farm, and it seems they have forged an enduring friendship.

As Beatrix grows into adulthood, her frigid relationship with her mother leads her into an ill-advised early marriage that produces a daughter, Thea. When Beatrix decides to leave England to pursue a Canadian man she has met in London, she begs Rosamond and her partner, Rebecca, to look after the girl for a brief time. The time lengthens from weeks into two years, and Rosamond experiences some of the happiest moments of her life caring for the young girl. In the midst of that interlude she realizes a bitter truth "about happiness that has no flaws, no blemishes, no fault line," and that is "the certain knowledge that it will have to come to an end." Indeed, when Beatrix, a husband and newborn son accompanying her, returns from Canada to reclaim Thea, the girl's departure fractures the relationship between Rosamond and her lover and over time Rosamond and Beatrix drift apart.

With apparent inevitability when viewed through the prism of Rosamond's memory, Beatrix's estrangement from her mother is reenacted in her relationship with Thea. In the 1970s, Thea hooks up with a marginal rock musician, their liaison producing Imogen, a beautiful girl with blonde hair and "deep blue, sightless eyes that somehow manage to gleam so brightly," as Rosamond describes her portrait. Rosamond doesn't live to recount the end of the women's story, but when Thea and Gill ultimately connect we learn, as Gill concludes, "Nothing was random after all."

The events and places Rosamond describes aren't, for the most part, inherently dramatic --- the loss of a family pet, a seaside picnic, a sumptuous Christmas dinner in a warmly lit farmhouse. What gives this novel its depth is the way in which each of the pictures slowly triggers an unlocking of Rosamond's memories to reveal an ever-widening story, more intricate and more tragic as her narrative unwinds along with the reels of tape. Coe ably channels Rosamond's voice --- ruminative, melancholy, restrained and frank. Her rich narrative gives the lie to her observation that "A photograph is a poor thing. It can only capture one moment, out of millions of moments, in the life of a person, or the life of a house."

THE RAIN BEFORE IT FALLS is a modest and yet thoughtful work. It tenderly reveals the complexity of familial love, the damage we inflict by the decision to offer or withhold it and the understanding, never more than partial at best, sometimes glimpsed at the end of a long life.

--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg (mwn52@aol.com)

I think this is a wonderfully written novel that will have a difficult time receiving a wide readership because it's one of the most depressing novels I've read since Madame Bovary. Dysfunctional mothers, suicide, love and friendships rejected, death, poverty, abuse, and unhappiness at every turn of the page.

And yet, Coe's writing made me reread passages several times and even want to steal certain turns of phrase for my own blog!

I did read some of the reviews of this book from London newspapers on my library's databases, and some did not like the author's use of the 20 photographs that Rosamond describes to her blind friend Imogen in the attempt to help Imogen "see" and thus understand her history. It seems that it is 50% that, but ends up, of course, being another half Rosamond's effort to review her own life and justify the choices she made along the way.

And just as Rosamond and Imogen have a little discussion about what the rain is "before it falls", and Imogen, with the innocence of a child answers that it isn't real, so too is life before it is lived. You can sit at the end of life and with 20-20 hindsight perhaps expect to determine if you did the right things, but it is just hindsight.

So, the irony is that even when we come to the end and can see the past, Rosamund is still uncertain in many instances if she did the right things at the right times. Gosh, all that to say I really liked the use of the photographs as a plot construction tool. I found myself tuning in to looking at the scenes as if I were responsible for a stage construction.

If you enjoy "literary fiction" and don't mind a downpour of emotional content, this novel won't be just another blur of a read. The characters and the setting are quite unforgettable.

This book has so much to recommend it, it is hard to know where to begin. Coe is a master of mood, character, and plot, as evidenced in this book as well as in his other fine books. But whereas The Liar's Club and its sequal, Closed Circle, focus on a group of male friends, this is a story of women joined by not always nourishing family ties. The structure alone is intriguing, with family photographs providing impetus to an old woman's memory, as she dictates her past into a tape recorder, in order to reveal to a younger woman her own history.

A little girl queries about rain: what exactly is the rain before it falls? Isn't it really rain? Is it really just moisture, moisture in the clouds?

And the voice of authority replies: " `You see, there's no such thing as the rain before it falls. It has to fall, or it isn't rain.' It was a silly point to be making to a little girl..."

Yet this concept, this figment, this impossible thing ~ The Rain Before It Falls (Vintage Contemporaries) ~ is Jonathan Coe's claim for the complexity of love, the contradiction of human nature, the pretension of family, and the mystery of character in this quiet but soulful portrait of women.

Coe's artful and gentle prose in this elegiac narrative is reserved yet revelatory. He diligently mines highly contradictory and deeply complex emotions between a family of English women, coaxing these emotions to the surface and revealing them with unsentimental sympathy.

At the heart of this graceful but tragic narrative is Rosamond, an elderly maiden auntie, living alone in Shropshire, England, who in anticipation of her death, records sixty years of family history on four cassette tapes. Accompanying the cassettes are twenty family photographs which complement the emotional story Rosamond feels she must tell before she dies.

Rosamond proves to be the family doyenne of storytelling. Her nuanced narrative is dedicated to the bonds between three generations of women in her family. Her focus is primarily on women's relationships with other women ~ relationships within the family dynamic, within friendships, within romantic, marital and sexual partnerships. Some relationships are solid and enduring, others are frayed or fractured, and some are damaged beyond repair. Through the voice of Rosamond, Coe dives deeply into the female perspective, following the complexities of that perspective back into the past to examine a family history of love: love engendered, love made, love lost, love destroyed and love rekindled.

The Rain Before It Falls (Vintage Contemporaries) is a story thick with drama and pathos. Heartache and sadness, anger and resentment, abuse and violence dominate. Yet Coe has the remarkable ability to distill such a heavy narrative into sheer poetry. Amazing to me that he, as a male writer, can get so deeply inside a woman's heart, navigating an interior landscape so heavy with passion, so dense with complexity, with such gentle directness and lovely, smooth prose, that his narrative still floats. His beautiful poetic descriptions are rich and vivid, entrancing us with color, texture and sound and surprising us with truth. This is intimate, organic storytelling, deeply and gracefully humane and a beautiful work of art.

The Rain Before It Falls (Vintage Contemporaries) is a stunning demonstration of the great versatility of Jonathan Coe, a writer I am so thrilled to have recently discovered. Jonathan Coe is definitely a writer to be excited over!

This book should be made into a film. And I found it far easier to read than "Atonement," which was too wordy and dense for me (and I'm a Henry James fan). First of all, I was surprised to read here that some critics didn't like the device of using photographs to tell the story to a blind girl. To me, that was one of the best things about the writing, ingenious and entertaining. I couldn't wait to hear what the next image would be - and yet I didn't want to leave the tale from the last one. Also, I enjoyed the dark and perverse interactions of the protagonists. The main character, the one telling the story, reveals her own dark side toward the end, but I don't want to spoil it for future readers. It's a fascinating tale, one of the best books I've read in a long time, but it does leave one with a peculiar, "unfinished" feeling, though the "facts" appear to have been laid out and brought to a "satisfying" conclusion. Still - as a writer myself - I found the theme of life's being a giant mystery actually more satisfying than a pat ending. Strange, strange book - and yet it also tapped into my own life's story in ways I won't go into here. I wonder if other readers felt the same way.

I picked up Jonathan Coe's eighth novel, The Rain Before It Falls, because I was intrigued by the title. I had never heard of the London-based author before. Now I can't wait to get my hands on his other works.

The Rain Before It Falls opens with the death of Gill's Aunt Rosamond. Seems kind of morbid at first, especially when her doctor finds her in her chair with a record player going and a tape machine nearby. Niece Gill's instructions are to find Imogen and give the four tapes to her. If Gill cannot locate the child, who must be about 30 years old by now, she can listen to the tapes.

Gill vaguely recalls Imogen, a blind child of seven or eight at Aunt Rosamond's fiftieth birthday party. She has no idea of the girl/woman's last name nor where she might be living. With the help of her two daughters and Rosamond's solicitor, Gill tries to locate Imogen. The search is summarized quickly in the first twenty pages, leaving readers to wonder what track the novel could take. Between pages twenty-one and twenty-seven, readers get a quick overview of Gill's relationship with her aunt, her husband, and her daughters. Then on page twenty-eight the real story begins. Gill and her daughters decide to listen to the tapes in hope of locating Imogen.

Rosamond has carefully chosen twenty photographs that will explain Imogen's life. As the child is blind, Rosamond describes the people, places, and things in each of the photographs, all the while giving Imogen her family history. The format reminded me of both Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven and Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why.

By the fourth picture and accompanying lengthy description, I was beginning to get a little bored. The fifth picture picked up the storyline (for me) and from there until the end of the novel, I was hooked. In the rest of the novel, there are some verifications of subjects/events/happenings that have been skillfully foreshadowed. And as the novel draws closer and closer to its climax, there are some major bombshells and twists that left me gasping out loud (something I haven't experienced since Jonathan Hull's Losing Julia).

Simply put, ya gotta read this book!

Armchair Interviews agrees.

This is a wonderful story about love, friendship, family relationships and even mental illness. It is presented in a very creative manner: an old woman uses a stack of pictures to tell the story. She picks up each in turn and records a description of the picture and the story behind it to blind woman who will be on of her heirs and who is an important part of her life. Very well done.

The story is told by Rosamund, who believes she will soon pass away. She is recording her family history on tape for the mysterious Imogene. We learn Imogene is blind and adopted out of her family at the age of three and that is why Rosamund feels the need to recount her family history for the girl.

Rosamund was evacuated from London to her aunt and uncle's farm in Shropshire during the war. It was there she met her older cousin Beatrix. As the story unfolds, it becomes apparent Aunt Ivy abuses Beatrix, mentally, emotionally and physically. The cycle begins and we learn that it has extended over three generations. Ivy toward Beatrix, then Beatrix toward her daughter Thea and finally Thea toward her daughter Imogene.

Rosamund's narration touches on family love and tragedy. Chance happenings that have an influence on people's lives and a family saga that is complex makes for a brilliant read.

I needed a day to process this book after finishing it. This is hands down, one of the most well-written novels I have read in a long time. The character depth is astounding! I felt as though I knew these people, that their story could have been in my family.

Jonathan Coe's highly acclaimed "The Rain Before It Falls" is an epic tale of love, loss and above all family. When Gill cleans finds out her Aunt has passed away she is left to deal with her estate. What she finds is a series of tapes that her Aunt Rosamond had recorded with instructions that they be delivered to a girl - now a woman- named Imogen. Gill vaguely remembers Imogen from her Aunt Rosamonds 50th birthday party, but aside from that occasion knows not much about her.

Gill is unable to locate Imogen, so she and her daughters go ahead and listen to the tapes. What follows is a description of 20 photographs. How amazing! It was like looking through a photo album and having all the circumstances surrounding those photos told to you.

What unfolds is a story of inevitability. A series of events all seemingly linked, and tragic at their very core. What comes from those events is Imogen, a little girl that lost her vision in an awful accident when she was 3 years old.

This book is a must read! You will find yourself reading this book rather quickly. The emotions Coe evokes are strong, and you will be compelled to continue on.

The Rain Before It Falls is a poetic exploration of mothers and daughters, and even grandmothers as it beautifully charts the progress of one Shropshire family from the War years through to the present day through a series of photographs. Upon her death at the age of seventy-three of her great-aunt Rosamund, the middle-aged Gil learns of the existence of a series of photos and four cassette jewel cases of tapes who Rosamund had apparently gifted to a girl named Imogen who Gil had met only once, more than twenty years ago.

Rosamund had left no children. Her longtime companion - a woman called Ruth - had died some years earlier, and her sister Sylvia was also dead and none of them had left any indication to the whereabouts of Imogen. Helped by her two daughters, Catharine and Elizabeth, Gil frantically tries to investigate, while also wondering what could possibly have motivated her enigmatic aunt to arrange such a strange and eccentric request.

If Gil is, by some chance, unable to locate the mysterious Imogen, Rosamund had requested that Ros listen to the tapes herself. So when an investigation into the location of Imogen comes to a dead-end, and with her thoughts drifting randomly, floating and un-tethered, Ros gathers Catharine and Elizabeth together to listen, all three women unwilling to turn their back on Rosamund's appeal.

What begins as the ramblings of an old woman speaking into a microphone alone in the sitting room of her bungalow in Shropshire, soon becomes touching story of a lifelong friendship of two cousins who were once so close that they could have been sisters and who endured decades together, both coming to be embroiled in unrequited live and failed marriages, and both enduring their fair share of hardship and pain.

Although the first photo is Rosamund as a child, living on the suburbs of Birmingham, it is the second photograph of a picnic and a family group taken at Wardon Farm in 1941, the home of her aunt and uncle, that becomes the core of the novel and where Rosamund meets the eleven-year-old Beatrix. Quickly becoming allies and sisters, and partners in crime, a caravan at the Farm becomes a place where they can both retreat and hide and to plot an escape attempt to run away together to Birmingham.

It is this act of rebellion that firmly cements Rosamund and Beatrix's friendship, the bond between them lasting throughout most their adult lives even as Rosamund becomes a sort of substitute mother to Beatrix's wayward and unloved daughter, Thea and later as she frantically tries to adopt Imogen, Thea's damaged off-spring. In the process, Rosamund's life steadily unfolds against a backdrop of a brutally repressive England of the 1950's and a prejudice that is so often subtle and unspoken, but unmistakably there, time and again over the years.

Rosalind is clearly captivated with Beatrix; she's Rosalind's best friend constantly orbiting her life in various ways over the years. Always the self-effacing stalwart, Rosalind is forced to into a confrontation with Beatrix and her bad marriages, and accident that nearly cripples her, and her neglect and mistreatment Thea. It's not surprising that Thea grows up feeling unwanted and worthless and incapable of emotion.

The novel is filled with the collateral damage of all the unsuitable relationships and bad choices that Beatrix, and later, Thea, makes. Even when Rosalind finds the person of her dreams, Beatrix cannot help but try and sabotage it. Much of the drama in the last half of the story revolves Thea, unaware of the twists and turns her narrative is about to take, a fragile sense of security underpinning everything she does, her life always on the verge of splintering forever into fragments.

In prose that reflects a sort of graceful abstractedness and also a steely English reserve, Coe brings to the forefront Rosalind's shadowy and nebulous emotions that are tempered with regret or jealousy. Rosamund readily admits that in making these tapes she's driven by the desire to give Imogen a sense of her own history, a sense of where she came from and of the forces that had made her.

Moving from Birmingham, to Shropshire and its surrounds, to swinging London in the sixties and the seventies, and then even onto Toronto Canada, The Rain Before it Falls is all about the nature of memory and how the patterns of existence can ultimately shape how we see and how we relate to each other. Gil finally recognizes this when she finally connects the events of Rosalind's life with family dog that inexplicably runs away - first Beatrix in pursuit, then Imogen, mother and granddaughter racing against the odds, almost fifty years apart.

Rosalind's photographs do remain at the novel's core, her descriptions of them indeed quite exquisite: the blazing gold fields of Shropshire; a boat on the Serpentine in Hyde Park; the gaunt and somber silhouettes of Warden Farm standing out blackly in the moonlight. In the end, this is an exact and perfectly tempered book, and serves as not just a testament to one family's struggles throughout the decades, but also a testimony to the sometimes-troubling intricacies of the human condition. Mike Leonard May 08.