36 Albion, Anna Hope
I do love a country house novel and this is a corker - with reservations.
Philip Brooke - landowner, sixties counterculture playboy and general shit husband and father - has died. His children gather at the family home, "twenty bedrooms of Sussex sandstone", to bury him.
Frannie, the eldest and Philip's heir, is a grown-up eco warrior (as a young woman she lived in trees at the Newbury protest) who has spent the last decade working with her father to re-wild the thousand acre estate. Passionate about nature and famous in her own way for the success she has had in re-introducing native species, she's also the only one who understands that the inheritance tax bill may mean the family losing the estate altogether. Milo, a recovering addict, still bears the scars of being sent off to boarding school at 8 while his sisters stayed at home. He believes that his father offered him, in his final days, part of the estate to develop as a wellness retreat for the One Percent ("heal the leaders and you heal the world"). And finally |sa, the youngest, who has stayed as far away as she can from her family for a long time, and therefore hasn't had even the partial reconciliation with her difficult father than her two siblings managed before he died.
It's all set up for a fantastic Succession-style family inheritance row, but that's not really where Hope is going with this. There are others in the story, outside the family (or sort of - discussions over who gets to attend a small family-only funeral raise the question of who, actually, is family) - Ned, their father's old friend, who lives on the land in an old van growing his own dope and making herbal tinctures; Jack, handsome son of one of the estate families, and Isa's childhood love, and Clara, flying over from America to attend the funeral for reasons that aren't quite clear. Yet.
And the animals, and the trees, and the ghosts. Hope writes beautifully about the southern English countryside, invoking Kipling, and pastoral poetry, and folk songs - if New York City is the star of When Harry Met Sally, then the countryside of the Sussex-Kent border is undoubtedly the star of this book. She also summons the human history embedded in the landscape: the family's own younger selves, the memories still living vividly in the familiar places; the ancestors, looking down from photographs and paintings; the villagers, removed from their land when the park was enclosed in the eighteenth century; and others, whose story is bound up with that of the family and its privilege.
I loved the first 3/4 of this book. It's maybe a little slow but Hope draws her characters and setting skilfully, heightening the tension as the day of the funeral approaches until you feel that any one of them could be the one to pull the trigger and bring down chaos. I was disappointed, then, by what happens when it actually hits (and being a bit vague here to avoid spoilers). The last section, to me, felt rushed and weak - having asked some fundamental questions about ecology, about privilege, about how we treat our world and our fellow humans - she kind of drops it and allows it all to stumble to an unsatisfying conclusion.