Some judicious editing might have helped
things along. But “Homecoming” is always readable and the characters engage our
sympathy – or most of them do - as the story reaches its climax. (Review by
Margaret von Klemperer)
Kate Morton’s novel Homecoming opens in South Australia in 1959, in the small quiet town of Tambilla where everyone knows everyone else and not a lot happens, until a woman, Isabel Turner, and three of her four children are found dead at a picnic. There are no obvious signs of violence, but the new baby is missing from her crib. Then the action moves abruptly to London in 2018, where Jess Turner-Bridges, a short-of-money freelance journalist is looking for a story to write.
However, Jess gets a call from Australia summoning her home to Sydney where her grandmother Nora, who brought Jess up when her own mother Polly went to lead her own life, has had a serious fall and is in hospital. Jess leaves what she is beginning to consider her home to head back to the place she grew up, puzzled as to why Nora should have fallen on the attic stairs – an attic she never went to and also discouraged anyone else from going there.
We soon discover that Nora’s sister-in-law was Isabel, the dead woman at the centre of the mystery.
Slowly, as Morton takes us backwards and forwards in time, the startling and tragic history of Nora, Polly and Jess is revealed, along with the linked events of half a century ago in South Australia, which has its own cast of characters. And a third section of the narrative is taken up with the contents of a book written about the events in Tambilla by an American journalist who happened to be there.
There are hints as to what happened in the small town, and red herrings to make the reader think they may have solved the mystery before the author takes us to the solution (though I came pretty close to most of it).
As well as being a novel about solving an old mystery, it is a book about truth and lies, relationships between mothers and children, husbands and wives, and about what is home. Is it a physical place or is it more complex than that? In some ways, that is the most successful part of the book. Too often the mystery part of the plot clunks a bit, and moves very slowly.
Some judicious editing might have helped things along. But Homecoming is always readable and the characters engage our sympathy – or most of them do - as the story reaches its climax. - Margaret von Klemperer
Kate Morton’s novel Homecoming is published
by Mantle: ISBN 978-1-5290-9405-3
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