And now on to Maggie O’Farrell’s brand new book.

Instructions for a Heatwave (Amazon, B&N, Book Depository) is less suspenseful than the previous books by Maggie O’Farrell that I’ve read (or else I am maybe remembering her previous books all wrong). Gretta Riordan’s husband leaves the house one day — as usual — and just does not come back again. Panicked, she calls up her three children — sensible Monica, anxious Michael Francis, and the late arrival, the problem child, Aoife — to come home at once. It’s been ages since anybody was in regular contact with Aoife (she never got along with Gretta, and Monica has not recovered from a several-years-past falling-out), while Michael Francis and Monica are struggling to shore up their struggling marriages.

Instructions for a Heatwave — like all of Maggie O’Farrell’s books — is at its best when exploring family dynamics. Maggie O’Farrell’s best skill, I think, is writing about the space between people. Although she’s writing about an exceptional time in the lives of these characters, it’s the small everyday things that tell the story of their relationships, like this exchange after Gretta scolds Michael Francis, and Aoife defends him:

Gretta makes a small noise of disgust and gestures as if wafting away a bad smell. “Oh, you two.”

“You two what?”

“It’s always been the same?”

“Always taking the other one’s side. No matter if they’re in the wrong.”

With family, it’s never just the events that are happening, the words that you’re saying. Any moment can suddenly be imbued with all the weight and significance of decades of knowing each other. O’Farrell is wonderful at making her characters’ relationships feel lived-in that way.

Particularly she’s wonderful at letting the reader see into the family mythology — Monica is the good one (the favorite), and Michael Francis is the anxious guilty one, and Aoife is the unpredictable one, the wild child. Robert, their father, is quiet; Gretta, their mother, is gregarious and histrionic. When they have been apart from each other for a while, you can see how they’ve fallen into thinking of each other as cartoons of their assigned family quality. The main shock of finding Robert Riordan gone is that the family has been accustomed to forget his interiority, to forget that their quiet, undemanding father ever had a life outside of them.

At times O’Farrell seems not to have quite enough time to weave all of her plot strands together. Aoife’s life, blighted by her ferocious efforts to hide the fact that she’s never learned to read, is fleshed out quite vividly, but there are areas of Michael Francis’s life, and particularly of Monica’s, that seemed brought up only to be tossed away. Both their marriages are struggling, and for good reasons, but their spouses never come into focus as people. I wanted Monica and Michael Francis to be used as well as Aoife was, to draw out different sides of the other characters and different ways of thinking about their lives.

The slightly desultory handling of some of these plot threads was frustrating in the end. The climax felt anticlimactic, as the characters shifted almost instantly into acceptance of their altered situation. Missing out on their process of living in a new version of normal — particularly, missing out on the conversations between the siblings about what happened — was disappointing. I felt unfinished when the book was over.

Note: I received this review copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Also, if you buy a book through one of my affiliate links, I get a small amount of money.

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Five Quarters of the Orange is about a woman called Framboise who has come back to the town where she grew up and opened up a cafe under an assumed name. She cannot use her own name because of some shit that went down in her childhood. We are not privy to what this was, but suffice it to say, her mother, now deceased, was mightily unbeloved of the villagers. And it had to do with Germans in World War II, when the town was occupied. The action of the story goes back and forth between the present day, when Framboise is trying to fend off her nephew and niece’s attempts to get her story out of her for profit, and her attempts to remember the past and figure out what her mother was thinking and doing.

Although I am a fan of double plotlines, it’s difficult for the two plotlines to achieve any kind of parity. Almost always, one plotline is notably awesomer than the other, and then you are always skimming through the less-interesting plotline, impatient to get back to the more-interesting plotline. Work book club universally seemed to agree with me on this. We all wanted the modern-day plotlines to knock it off and get us back to the flashbacks. Because what were these kids doing with the Germans? What information were they passing along and what were the consequences?

A more serious problem for me was the tonal difference between past and present. The plotline set during World War II is so dark. The kids are neglected, this one German soldier is nice to them, and they’re suckers for his kindness. The mother has these horrific migraines and becomes addicted to morphine, and it’s unclear what all she’s willing to do to get her supply of morphine. Whereas the present-day plotline has this almost Home-Alone-y feel, with Framboise and her friend Paul outwitting the nefarious, grasping villains who are trying to get her recipes and her story. It was jarring! I can understand the need for sections with a lighter tone, but in execution this didn’t work for me.

On the good side, Harris is good at ambiguity. The narrator is a secretive woman, and in keeping with that, she doesn’t tell everything. We never find out exactly what happened with her older sister, Reinette, although we can draw conclusions from what we are told. The broader story of the village is the same way — we can deduce roughly what other people were up to, but it’s all deduction. Framboise doesn’t spell it out for us.

Goodish, I would say? A very good book club book and an acceptably good book for me? I didn’t like it as much as Gentlemen and Players, and I didn’t dislike it the way I did Chocolat. I think Joanne Harris may be one of those middle-of-the-road authors to me, where I get her books from the library occasionally but never ever buy one.

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