There's an underwater quality to the light at Bridlemere, a greenish cast from the foliage that surrounds the house. Sound changes too, noise fades, so that you hardly hear the traffic outside. At Bridlemere there is only the slow settling of rubbish and the patter of cats, and, when he is not roaring a lungful, the subtle sounds of Mr. Flood moving, or the silence of him standing still. Sometimes there is a kind of hushed rustling, a sort of whispering. Like a sheaf of leaves blown, or a prayer breathed, rushed and desperate, just out of earshot.
As Mr. Flood's Last Resort begins, we meet Maud Drennan – a single thirty-something care worker – who has just been assigned to the notorious Mr. Cathal Flood – a fractious, elderly hoarder whose London mansion, Bridlemere, is stuffed with cat hair, sardine tins, and a Great Wall of National Geographic magazines meant to prevent outsiders from meddling in his business. As Maud scrubs and clears and stands up to Mr. Flood, something starts sending her messages from “beyond” – photographs with the faces of people burnt away, initials drawn in the dust, long-sealed envelopes revealing themselves – and Maud is forced to confront the fact that the seemingly batty old man might be hiding a dangerous secret. The atmosphere of this book is moody and mysterious, and with both supernatural intervention and flesh-and-blood characters who may not be who they say they are, it literally feels like anything can happen. Even so, the plot gets lost in too many extraneous threads, and just like with Jess Kidd's debut novel, Himself, I found myself enjoying this read more in the moment than admiring it after the fact. I'd still be happy to pick up her next book.
“They're not like this on the television, investigations, are they? Two downcast women in a maisonette with a bottle of krupnik.”Maud's landlord (and, perhaps, only friend) is an agoraphobic, transsexual, true crime aficionado. This Renata is a wonderful character – dignified in her wigs and caftans, totally believable in her competing concern for Maud's safety and the vicarious thrill she gets from investigating “a case” – and you get a quick read on other characters through whether they refer to Renata as “madam” or “a nonce” (when one character goes from respectful interplay to later referring to Renata as “he”, that one little pronoun is devastatingly ugly.) In a subthread, we learn that Maud's older sister went missing as a teenager, and as Maud discovers more about the sad history at Bridlemere, her own memories of loss are dredged up, with this storyline playing out as a mystery as well: just what did seven-year-old Maud know at the time and what secrets has she kept for all these years? One consequence of her disappearing sister is the fact that Maud has been visited ever since by visions of the saints, with a sex-encouraging St. Valentine and an armour-rattling St. George played for laughs; a lamp-rubbing St. Dymphna and the plain-robed St. Rita offering advice and encouragement from the shadows. In addition to the otherworldly help that Maud receives from her saints and the poltergeist(s) at Bridlemere, Renata reads tarot cards and sends Maud to a psychic; her own dreams are frequently interspersed and add to the spooky atmosphere:
She's moving along the hall under the carpet, the woman. See the ripple she's causing. The pattern undulates with her. She moves quickly, following the sweep of the staircase down. Feet first like a breech birth she comes. Arms crossed high over her chest like a mummy. At the bottom step she bunches up, curls, and swells, pushing against the edge of the carpet. Then with a rush like waters breaking, she pools out, a liquid shadow, a dark puddle on the tiles. Behind her the carpet flattens as if nothing at all has happened.But despite all this supernatural assistance, Maud needs to carry on as a care worker (a field that the author has also worked in) and it's touching to watch her make a connection with Mr. Flood and fight for him; dealing with office bureaucracy, meddlesome family members, and her own suspicions of the old man's wrongdoing. And yet...despite Kidd's attempts to make it seem like there is a major mystery to solve – and that, perhaps, everything will eventually interconnect in a satisfying way – that's not really the way it all plays out; and I found that not just disappointing, but confounding. As Maud is from Ireland's west coast, she often speaks in the charming Irish way that I loved in Himself; but since this story is set in England, there aren't opportunities this time round for Irish verbal jousts. Still: the language, the atmosphere, the characters – all engaging; the plot: not so much.
