Before the Ruins
by Victoria Gosling
A book review
Memory is a house, a castle with many rooms.
Some of the rooms are deeper inside, honeycombed away. Each has a thousand keys
– an image, a smell, a sound. Behind each door are a thousand other doors.
Victoria Gosling’s debut novel Before the
Ruins is based on a common literary trope – that of a narrator who revisits
formative events experienced by a younger, less experienced self. In this case, the story is told by
thirty-eight-year-old Andrea, known to her old friends as Andy, now working in
London as a compliance officer for an investment fund. What triggers her exercise in retrospection
is the sudden disappearance of Peter, a close childhood companion and the son
of the vicar of the village where Andy grew up. This mystery evokes memories of
the golden summer of 1996. In search of adventure after their final exams,
Peter, her boyfriend Marcus and their friend Em had broken into a local
abandoned manor and befriended David, a young man their age who was living
there in hiding after an ill-advised card theft. Inspired by the story of the theft of a diamond
necklace fifty years earlier and the subsequent sudden death of a potential
suspect, the five play treasure hunts with a replica necklace, secretly hoping to
find the real thing.
A
crumbling stately home, hidden jewels, nostalgic accounts of summer holidays…
the novel’s initial chapters feel like a grown-up version of the Famous Five – not
unlike Secret Passages in a Hillside Town by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, albeit without the latter’s crazy weirdness.
However, this
description doesn’t really do justice to what turns out to be a narratively complex
work. The novels juggles
three timelines – the present, 1996 (with an ‘epilogue’ which happens three
years later) and, to a lesser extent, 1936.
I read somewhere that the book’s working
title was The Mysteries. Before
the Ruins sounds more poetic, with its punning play on the meaning of “before”,
simultaneously suggesting an account of what led to the narrator’s “apocalypse”
(i.e. before as “prior”) and a spectator surveying the results of a tragic
collapse (i.e. before as “in front of”).
Yet, “The
Mysteries” goes straight to the heart of the novel. Because this is indeed a book based on mysteries
– not just the location of the missing
jewels (harkening to the plots of Enid Blyton and classic “cozy” detective novels)
but also, and more importantly, the secrets which the characters, despite being
close friends, are constantly hiding; the lies they tell each other and,
sometimes, themselves; the domestic tragedies and abuse lived in silence
between four walls. In a meta-twist, the
novel becomes at once a mystery novel and a novel about mysteries. Significantly, towards the end, after
watching an episode of a detective novel on TV, Andrea ruminates about
How different
the programme was from life. How life
was full of mysteries that would not be solved, not ever, while we lived. But
that each of us would play the detective nonetheless, and the life and death we
would investigate, whether we knew it or not, was our own, and the thing was
not to become deadened to them, to the mysteries.
Admittedly, as the “mysteries” pile up, we as
readers are increasingly expected to suspend our disbelief. Just like during an airing of The
Midsomer Murders one starts to wonder whether the levels of intrigue in Wiltshire villages might not be statistically skewed… Frankly, I did not mind this at all. I could not care less about the improbability
of certain plot twists and just read on, immersed and, more often than not, moved.
What I liked best about Before the Ruins
is how the novel’s several storylines are presented within the structure of a poetic coming-of-age narrative, one whose aching nostalgia reminded me of Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited (referenced in the title of one of the final chapters). Perhaps it helped that, like the narrator, I
also came of age in the nineties – and whilst I wasn’t dropping Es or carousing
in abandoned manors in the English countryside, I still lovingly remember that
decade.
Or perhaps the novel touched deeper,
speaking to the little boy curled up on a sofa reading The Famous Five...
Kindle Edition, 320 pages
Expected publication: July 2nd 2020 by Serpent's Tail
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