“The Briar Club” is a
cleverly constructed, lively and entertaining read, maybe not terribly profound
but enjoyable with enough in it to be a satisfying piece of historical fiction
that illuminates the time in which it is set and tells a cracking story. (Review
by Margaret von Klemperer, courtesy of The Witness)
The Briar Club opens on Thanksgiving Day 1954 in Washington DC in a slightly down-at-heel boarding house, Briarwood House, where the boarders and various others are gathered in the kitchen while the police investigate the corpse lying upstairs with its throat cut.
This section, as are various others throughout the book,
is narrated by the house itself which becomes a character in its own right.
And then we get to meet the residents, starting with the arrival, four years earlier, of Grace March who takes one of the rooms and slowly begins to mould the other women who live there, along with the dismal landlady’s two rather sad children, into a cohesive support group. When Mrs Nilsson, the landlady, goes off to her Thursday evening bridge dates, the others meet in Grace’s room for supper and friendship.
Kate Quinn has structured the novel so that each of the main characters has a section to herself, and we get to know them and their stories, and watch the events that have made them who they are on the fateful Thanksgiving night. We meet Irish-American Nora who falls for a gangster; Hungarian refugee Reka who is grumpy but with reason; Fliss, whose husband is a medic and away at the Korean War, leaving her to cope with their infant daughter; Bea who during the Second World War was a star of the women’s baseball league until injury cut her career short; red haired Claire who works for an anti-McCarthyite senator and hides much about herself, and fanatical anti-communist Arlene who falls for an FBI agent and is not too popular with the others. Until the end we learn the least about Grace, who is the catalyst for the interactions of the others.
And while we are finding about the boarders, some of their friends and the Nilsson children, the social conditions of the time are also being made clear – the prejudices, the fears that were rampant in the post Second World War years and the gang-ridden culture that prevailed in America. And then we find out that there is a second corpse in Briarwood House.
It’s difficult not to give spoilers to the plot – and they really would spoil the story. Quinn herself at the start of the author’s note warns that it would be a bad idea to read it before reading the book. The Briar Club is a cleverly constructed, lively and entertaining read, maybe not terribly profound but enjoyable with enough in it to be a satisfying piece of historical fiction that illuminates the time in which it is set and tells a cracking story. - Margaret von Klemperer
The Briar Club is published by Harper Collins: ISBN 978-0-00-864355-3
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