A Son of the Rock

Headline Review, 2007, 284 p.

One of Scotland’s favourite books.

In modern day Edinburgh Iris Lockhart is juggling life with her (married to someone else) lover Luke, her step-brother Alex and her business running a women’s clothes shop when she receives a phone call from a psychiatric unit informing her she now has legal responsibility for a great-aunt of whose existence she was previously unaware. This is Esme Lennox, born in India, where she had a gruesome experience when her younger brother Hugo died of typhoid while her parents and sister Kitty were away from home. The family subsequently returned to Edinburgh where Esme’s independent-mindedness and refusal to conform to the norms in school and social life of that time created problems: problems which eventually led to incarceration in an asylum. (In those days it only took the signature of a GP to lock up an inconvenient woman at a husband’s or father’s request. The woman could spend decades interned, only being released when the institutions began to shut down.)

Iris cannot confirm Esme’s identity as her father is dead, her mother has never heard of such an aunt and Iris’s paternal grandmother, Kitty, suffers from Alzheimer’s. She nevertheless takes her great aunt in when the hostel Esme was assigned turns out to be a dreadful place.

The lives of Iris and Esme are told in a close third person while Kitty’s first person stream of consciousness reminiscences are presented as if they were ramblings but within them are contained kernels of truth.

O’Farrell’s control of her material is masterly. (There may be one small foreshadowing misstep where long before the reveal we are given a clue to the mystery in a two-line paragraph which is repeated later. Maybe there are those who would have missed it on its first appearance but I would have thought once ought to have been enough.) The sections dealing with Esme’s time in India and those of the present day are handled with equal facility. Beautifully written and engaging.

Pedant’s corner:- “of husbands at the end of their tethers” (husbands, so that should be ends of their tethers,) the crew were scurrying (was,) “‘Aren’t I?’” (Okay, she was an ex-pat; but her parents were Scottish, it should be ‘Amn’t I?’) “‘You getting on one of your things about this, aren’t you?’” (You’re,) booties (they were for a baby, so bootees.)