“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!/You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout/Till you have drench’d our steeples,” Shakespeare’s King Lear shouts into the storm after he is spurned by two of his three daughters. Taking his desperate cry as its inspiration, Julia Armfield’s captivating novel “Private Rites” imagines a present city resembling London where storms haven’t just drenched steeples; they’ve drowned entire churches. Amid incessant rain, “narrowing gaps between floodplains,” unstable electrical grids and homes “whose foundations are coming apart,” an architect named Stephen Carmichael is celebrated in lavish coffee-table books for his ingenious, cantilevered structures built in “hillside enclaves … where it is still possible to stroll or drive a car,” hovering above the poor and the rising water levels. Following his death, his three queer adult daughters are left to grapple with his legacy, his divisive will and his “easy cruelty.”
What Lear calls his own three children’s “monster ingratitude,” Armfield recasts as trauma: Her protagonists have long endured their father’s neglect, condescension and pressure “to struggle for a love they should have known they couldn’t earn.” Isla, the oldest, is now a therapist with anxiety and an impending divorce; Irene has given up a Ph.D. thesis “on Christianity and silence” to work in an office administering payroll; and their youngest sister, Agnes, is a “palpably dissonant mix of tender and standoffish,” a barista who feels deeply but fears attachment. All three live in their father’s shadow; Irene reflects that it’s “impossible not to go on living their lives as if he were just in the next room.”
What is salvageable in a dissolving world? In this probing novel, the question is both political and personal: What will it take to renew the social order, and to shake the memory of a father who once told a young Agnes that if she did not stop crying, “someone would come along in the night to take her away”?
Armfield forgoes sentimental scenes and simple answers for suspense and horror, building an eerie mystery around an incident in Carmichael’s own house, long ago: voices heard by a child downstairs, “a mouth spilling blood,” strange scratchings on the walls. Within these genre tropes Armfield is also writing a novel of character and place, developing each daughter’s perspective alongside that of an entity simply called City, which reveals the Orwellian desolation of climate apocalypse on the ground, of “bad air and unpredictable pressure,” of commuters on flooded train lines and general squalor.
Shakespeare’s play begins with Lear’s impossible desire to measure his daughters’ love: “Which of you, shall we say, doth love us most?” Regan and Goneril offer pleasing words, but Cordelia will not flatter. Her stubborn silence sets in motion a plot that builds to a torrent of words as Lear goes mad. In contrast, the father in “Private Rites” is dead and silent, his cruel words recalled only in his children’s minds. We know Stephen Carmichael by his creations, especially the steel-and-glass “floating house” he calls “White Horse,” the apogee of his art and emblem of his power. Armfield makes brilliant use of the glass house as a site of secrets and violence; like Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” Carmichael’s structures withstand time and tide. Armfield invites us in, honoring the greatness and darkness of Lear’s drama. Then, thrillingly, she starts throwing stones.
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