The Wish House
Celia Rees
• Price — £10.99
• Publication — Macmillan
The baking summer of 1976 provides the backdrop for Celia Rees’s novel of life meets art meets magic — a tale of initiation into the world of adult relationships. Fifteen-year-old Richard is on holiday once again at a south Wales caravan site with his parents. All his mother wants to do is sit and read detective novels. His father disappears each day to fish. Richard goes exploring in all his old haunts and finds the once abandoned Wish House, an isolated manor, inhabited by the artist Jay Dalton, his wife Lucia, son Joe, and, most irresistibly, daughter Clio.
At once bemused and compelled by the family’s bohemian lifestyle, Richard is readily drawn into a passionate affair with Clio. He also becomes a model for Jay, a difficult and forbidding character working with mythical themes.
As the summer unfolds, Richard learns about sunbathing naked, extended families of step-relatives, the plants in a witch’s garden, the source of artistic inspiration and the power of obsessive love and possessive jealousy. The cover promises a book about “First love. First sex. First death.” It delivers.
This is a compelling read. Rees constructs her novel like a painting, brushing the language into shape as if it were pigment, and bringing the woods, the beach, the caravan site and the Wish House vividly to life. Venturing into the woods at night, Richard seems to be entering a painting. “Above him, the thin white blade of a moon had appeared, sharp as a scalpel in the deepening blue of the sky and far away a few bright stars dotted the shadowy purple horizon, shining out like distant lamps.”
This family could so easily be caricatures of the free-loving, hippy lifestyle, and there is nothing particularly original about the tangled web of family relationships or the idea of a naive, ordinary lad or lass being exploited by a charismatic artist. But unexpected depths of character are fleetingly revealed: there are no cardboard cutouts here. But Rees has such lucid command of the particular story she is telling that it makes its own mark.
{{/usCountry}}This family could so easily be caricatures of the free-loving, hippy lifestyle, and there is nothing particularly original about the tangled web of family relationships or the idea of a naive, ordinary lad or lass being exploited by a charismatic artist. But unexpected depths of character are fleetingly revealed: there are no cardboard cutouts here. But Rees has such lucid command of the particular story she is telling that it makes its own mark.
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