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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A modest and yet thoughtful work,
By Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Rain Before It Falls (Hardcover)
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)
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
5 stars for getting through the pathos,
By Nina (Nashville) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Rain Before It Falls (Hardcover)
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.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rain Before it Falls,
By
This review is from: The Rain Before It Falls (Hardcover)
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.
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