We Love Wednesdays - The Past by Tessa Hadley

The theme for this month's We Love Wednesdays is our suggestions for the best summer reads this August.

-These old houses are so expensive to maintain.

-We don't maintain it, Alice cheerfully said. She sat on the terrace steps with her bright face uplifted, hands clasped around her knee, keen to charm her new sister-in-law.

-We love it just as it is.

There is nothing that drags you out of a book more than shoddy dialogue. Characters who are clearly fictional, talking in a manner which real people never do. Tessa Hadley manages the opposite, to create dialogue so based in reality that it makes her characters flesh and blood, like you're sat in the room with them, listening to them interact as people and not literary devices.

The Past is the latest book from the acclaimed author of The London Train, and the first time I've picked up a Hadley. The dialogue structure was the first thing that really struck me, compelling me to walk through the door of the country cottage of the story's setting and take residence in the corner, watching this family drama unfold.

Told in 3 parts, two present and one the past, this is a tale of complex family ties and humanity. The four siblings, Alice, Fran, Roland and Harriet are genuine and flawed people, each with their own foibles and inadequacies they fumble with throughout the book. Alice is clinging to the last remaining refuge of her youth, Fran is struggling to control two children and a further child in the form of her husband, Roland wants his family to accept his new wife Pilar with open arms despite her cold and efficient manner, and Harriet is captivated by this new figure in her life, sending her into a spiral of mixed emotions.

The cast of characters are rounded out by Fran's mischievous children Ivy and Arthur, Alice's not-step-son Kasim and the apple of his eye, Roland's daughter Molly. Rounding out the ensemble are the siblings parents and grandparents in the Past segment and a dog named Mitzi who plays an oddly mysterious part in the many personal stories on display. Where some books would feel overwrought with such an extensive cast, Hadley manages to realise each as a unique character with their own personalities and desires, and their own past which unfolds throughout.

I found Harriet to be the most compelling of characters. Her reluctance to attend the gathering and her tendency to retreat to privacy gave her a quality that I appreciated as  the type who feels an artificial distance from family, myself. She feels uncertain. Her life isn't quite how she imagined it and spends much of the book struggling with the meaning of her existence, albeit in a non-exsistential way. Her attachment to Pilar is the major driving force of her story and plays out to a bitter-sweet ending that, if Hadley wasn't such a fantastic writer, could be seen as downbeat finale, but which I found bleakly funny, her farcical act of self destruction almost too ridiculous to not be darkly comic in its execution.

The writing in this novel is frequently beautiful and captures that soft focus feel of summer in the British countryside with it's rolling hills and bubbling streams, bringing back memories of my Nana's quaint bungalow and the surrounding quiet in North Wales.

The setting and characters are certainly a draw, but for me the dialogue was the stand out aspect which had me 200 pages into the book without a thought for the outside world. Hadley's ability to create real conversations makes these characters so relatable and recognisable. Each has a defined voice that immerses you in these people. Fran, for example, with a small aside about another character's enviable figure, reveals huge depths of her turmoil with personal image, telling you as much about her character as some authors manage in a page of description.

The Past is a drama that reaches into the heart of a family with a fulfilling depth. Superbly realised and expertly written, this is the perfect summer read for 2016. As beautiful as the landscape it takes place in.

Matt Smith

Chief Editor & Bookshop Manager, Waterstones Camberley.

Pick up your copy of The Past in store today. Click here to Click and Collect this item in your local store.