Tessa Hadley's 'The Past': Bittersweet nostalgia for a passing way of life

The Past

By Tessa Hadley

Harper. 311 pp. $26.99

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Reviewed by

Connie Ogle

nolead ends British author Tessa Hadley takes a different path through the family tale in The Past, her sixth novel. It's an elegy, brimming with nostalgia and gentle melancholy about a way of life that's ebbing away, for its characters and for the United Kingdom as a whole. Although a decidedly British novel, The Past is universal in its appeal.

Four adult siblings return for a final holiday at their grandparents' old home in Somerset. Their hectic, busy lives will wind to a crawl at the genteel, crumbling country house. Forget WiFi - there isn't even decent cellphone service, unless you trudge to the middle of a nearby field. Modern life is a distant marvel - and something almost everyone is relieved to have escaped temporarily.

Capable, unfussy Harriet, the eldest, arrives first, parks her car, and promptly disappears on a hike. Sister Alice comes with Kasim, a university student who's the son of an ex. Fran, the youngest, arrives next, irate that her husband has begged off at the last minute and stuck her with two children, odd little Ivy and her stoic brother, Arthur.

Readers should prepare themselves for the beautiful cadences of Hadley's descriptive, lyrical prose. The Past is not a swiftly paced novel (though you would never say it dragged). Luxuriating in Hadley's language is part of the novel's charm.

When Alice shows Kasim around the property, you long to see it, too: "She took him into the churchyard through a keyhole gap in a stone wall in the back garden. Her grandfather had been the minister here. The house and the church stood together on the rim of a bowl of air scooped deep between the surrounding hills, and buzzards floated on thermals in the air below them. The ancient stubby tower of the church, blind without windows, seemed sunk in the red earth: The nave was disproportionately all window by contrast, and the clear old quavering glass made its stone walls appear weightless."

Eventually, the final sibling shows up: much doted-on brother Roland, with his teenage daughter, Molly, and third wife, Pilar. The plan is for everyone to spend three weeks in bucolic languor, reminiscing about the past - particularly about their mother, Jill, who died when they were teenagers. But people being as they are - being as we are, actually - complications arise.

The Past is hopeful and bittersweet, with deep understanding of nuance, family bonds, and how our histories never leave us.

This review originally appeared in the Miami Herald.