“You” tells the story of Cecilia Bannan, who, with her husband and three daughters, returns to her childhood home in England to care for her ill mother, Dora. The first half of the book gently unfolds Cecilia’s childhood during the early 1970s after her parents buy a ramshackle property filled with mice and mold to create an artists’ community for hippies. The Bannans’ greater goal, however, is for Cecilia and her brothers to roam brackish moors, to be free and unencumbered, even by schoolwork.
But Cecilia doesn’t want chaos; she desires a proper education. When Dora is hired as a music teacher by the local boarding school, Cecilia enrolls. There, she and her mother soon meet the lovers who will consume them for the rest of their lives. For the teenage Cecilia, it’s her proper English teacher, James Dahl. In a seductive twist, Dora’s great love is none other than James’s wife.
(Bloomsbury USA) - "You: A Novel" by Joanna Briscoe
This is an interesting hook, but not quite in keeping with the first sentence: “It’s haunted, she thought.” Add to that the tone and ominous passages in the first half of the novel — “The fogs rolling down from the moors could smother lambs and young children” — and the mood is nothing less than gothic. However, the haunting refers not to the landscape but to the daughter whom Cecilia gave up 20 years ago after her affair with James. Cecilia’s mother, now dying of cancer, ponders her own decades-long affair and struggles with her role in her granddaughter’s adoption. So it’s not a gothic tale at all, but an altogether common story about regret — albeit one in which a mother and daughter unknowingly have affairs with a wife and husband respectively. Such grist! Unfortunately, Briscoe never fully realizes the concept’s potential and instead has her characters reflect on their relationships. And reflect and reflect and reflect.
There’s no doubt Joanna Briscoe is a fine writer. But too many of her sentences in the first half are self-consciously polished gems that distract from the actual story. And in the second half, the novel shifts to the present and truly falters. What had been a story of darkly held love becomes a melodrama of Cecilia battering her mother into revealing what became of her daughter, with a gratuitous twist near the end. There’s no suspense, no surprise. But the greatest shortcoming of “You” is that Cecilia never evolves. There is no transformative moment when she gains self-awareness, insight or in some way asserts her will over her world.
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MacKinnon is a freelance writer and author of the novel “Tethered.”
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