Stephanie Jones: Book Review - The Hiding Places by Catherine Robertson

Grief and guilt have all but strangled the will to live from April Turner, the heroine of Catherine Robertson’s thoughtful, languidly paced fourth novel, The Hiding Places. April walked out of her old life half a decade ago, after her five-year-old son was struck by a car and killed outside his school. He had been darting across the road to meet his mother, his attention captured by her brightly coloured dress.

April’s philosophy is that if she is forced to continue living, she will do so without colour; she gave up the right to joy, love, pleasure and a future when her son lost them. Her life is Spartan, free of anything to feed the senses or soul.

A set-up like this can only go a couple of ways, and Robertson’s journey is worth taking. April’s financial status is hovering just above ‘breadline’ when she discovers via an English solicitor that she is the rightful heir of Empyrean, a once-grand, now abandoned 34-room manse in Buckinghamshire. When April makes the trip to view the property and organize the paperwork for an immediate sale – she won’t countenance another option – the folk quietly assembling around her politely indulge the fancy. They know, as does the reader, that she isn’t going anywhere.

Which is a good thing for all concerned, because Robertson has a beautiful way with setting and character. The house in its current form – “a distressed gentlewoman doing her best to keep up appearances” – is vastly different from the home of the Potts family from which April has inherited. Her story is interspersed with the pre-World War II exploits of James Potts, whose group of friends included Sunny, now known by April as a wise dowager of nearly 90.

In learning of James, who did not survive the war, April mourns another lost son and discovers that her own grief, in the context of another, deadlier time, is almost pedestrian. Sunny’s mother was awarded for conspicuous gallantry after she died trying to save Bomber Command airmen trapped in the fuselage of a crashed plane, while Cora Potts decamped to Paris after her son’s death, leaving his father to suffer and ruminate in the declining Empyrean.

One reading of The Hiding Places might have April as the target of vast conspiracy of goodwill, surrounded by lifelong villagers who cannot abide her self-imposed exile. If Robertson overdoes April’s various ascetic rules – her refusal to eat any food less bland than soup; her irritation at the pleasure she finds in being kissed – the compensation is in witnessing her rescue. The world is full of kind and sensible people, and Robertson’s are among the true.

Those who have developed an affection for Robertson’s particular brand of comedic and romantic fiction will find The Hiding Places a departure from her previous novels. While it contains the promise of a happy ending (indeed, one of the novel’s few trying aspects is April’s studied obliviousness to having found her home), there is only a modest amount of the levity that infuses Robertson’s earlier work. There is, however, a similar empathy for the woman adrift who must find a new community. The Hiding Places is a beguiling story of grief overcome.