The Past

– It's not healthy, you know, Alice, poking around through all that old stuff. It's too depressing. There's no point in looking backward all the time.

– Why not? I like looking backward. It's amazing to imagine her when she was just a girl, and her life hadn't happened to her yet. The sixties and revolution and flared trousers and everything – all that was still to come. Dad was still to come.

The Past is a very quiet sort of book. With an omniscient viewpoint that hops between quite a few characters, we never get to know any of them very deeply. And with the setting confined, primarily, to one country house, the domestic dramas that play out are rather ordinary; the plot not taking any exceptional leaps. And yet, author Tessa Hadley writes these familiar scenes so perceptively that on nearly every page I would note something that would make me think, “Yes, I know that feeling, that type of person, those strains.” And there's value in this; in recording the ordinary and showing how a family's traits and beliefs quietly repeat through the generations. 

The book is divided into three sections: The Present, The Past, and then back to The Present. It begins with four adult siblings gathering, as they do every summer, at the mouldering old vicarage where their mother grew up, and which was left to them when their grandparents died. Harriet, the eldest and most responsible, comes alone, without her partner Christopher; Alice – the flighty sometimes actress and fading beauty – impulsively brings along Kasim (the 20 year old son of a former boyfriend); Roland – a professor of philosophy who has tried to make himself relevant with a sideline in pop film reviews – brings his 16 year old daughter Molly and his third wife Pilar (a beautiful Argentinian lawyer that Roland's sisters are just meeting for the first time); and Fran, the harried mother of two young children – Ivy and Arthur, who are serious and dramatic – is unhappy but unsurprised that her husband decided not to join the family this year. Although they keep putting off the important conversation, the siblings know that they will eventually need to face the truth: sitting empty for most of the year, the remote family home is in need of repairs that exceed its sentimental value, and it's probably time to sell.

All the siblings felt sometimes, as the days of their holiday passed, the sheer irritation and perplexity of family coexistence: how it fretted away at the love and attachment which were nonetheless intense and enduring when they were apart.

The reader learns fairly quickly the quirks and resentments of this family – all so very ordinary – and also their individual capacities for forgiveness and loyalty. Pilar throws the sisters off at first – with her insistence on not being treated as anything but just another Englishwoman – but while Alice and Fran speak secretly of their dislike for their brother's new wife, Pilar develops a closeness to Harriet that unbalances the well-worn family connections. Ivy and Arthur take to the romance of the surrounding woods and fields, and in their childish games, unearth unpleasantries that the adults are oblivious to. And as the only two young people for miles, Kasim and Molly form an attraction; to which the adults are decidedly not oblivious.

In the second section, The Past, the children's mother, Jill, brings Harriet, Roland and a baby Alice to the vicarage to stay with her parents while deciding whether or not to leave her husband. All we had learned of Jill in the first section was that she had died of cancer when Harriet was seventeen (and as their father then took off, the kids were left to basically raise themselves), and this section is very interesting as we watch Jill acting and voicing opinions in ways that we recognise later in her adult children. We also get to know Jill's parents – the accommodating Sophy and the intimidating Vicar Grantham himself – and there are many subtle foundations laid for later events. 

Action then resumes in The Present, and while events do lead to a climax (or two), it's still a very quiet and restrained story. I liked the way that flitting back and forth in time helped to make everyone feel more real: a mother who died too young was a sentimental trope until we meet her in 1968 in all her feist and fury; it's easy to dismiss Ivy and Arthur as unimportant characters – they're only children after all – until you meet Harriet, Alice, and Roland as children and realise that even in 1968 they were already formed into who they were destined to become. I enjoyed the writing about family relationships and also the pastoral elements of the English countryside. The past meets the present atop a gate in a field, the only place for miles with cellphone reception, where Alice spends a morning reaching out to friends in London:

A family of buzzards held their distances from one another as they floated on thermals above the scooped out valley – and she felt as if she floated too in the blue air: the woods on the valley's other flank were more densely blue, gathering darkness under their canopy. The landscape's pattern seemed as simplified as a child's jigsaw puzzle, locking together in bold pieces. Two old horses ambled to a fence to watch her, cocking their ears at her voice which must seem a silly shiny thread drawn across the mute surface of their day.

I enjoyed the writing in The Past very much, and despite not much happening, it didn't feel lightweight or frivolous. I enjoyed untangling the web of traits over the years and the only thing I didn't like was the very last scene (in which someone points out a connection that I don't think any reader could have missed). Even so, this might not be for everyone – I do appreciate that many readers want some bigger story to play out.