(8.5)Well what a surprise this book turned out to be. It has languished on my shelves since 2001. Neither the title nor the cover held much appeal. I had inherited it when I took over my late sister-in-laws books. It wasn't until it was recommended by a book group member that I decided to read it. It turned out to be a gem.
It is a gentle, melancholic story. Our narrator, Imogen Bailey, draws us in to the story in a voice as if she is speaking directly to you. She has become a writer and in an attempt to deal with her past she is writing a memoir of sorts.
At the age of 17 she became mute and her parents, one a surgeon and one a paediatrician decide she has had a breakdown and have her committed to a home for treatment. During this time she is informed of her older brother's death by drowning. Imogen struggles to accept this as he was a champion swimmer and continues to believe that he has swum away to a new life. Imogen makes the decision to speak so that she will be believed healed. She also decides to live independently of her parents. The author gradually reveals the reason for her silence.The small cast of characters are well drawn and credible. At the close of the story this reader wanted to believe like Imogen that one day her brother Johnny would return.
I am delighted to find that she is a prolific award winning writer. So hopefully I can find some more of her titles. ( )

He will come, and still I wait
He whistles at another gate
Where angels listen. Ah, I know
He will not come, yet if I go
How shall I know he did not pass
Barefooted in the flowery grass

The moon leans on one silver horn
Above the silhouettes of morn,
And from their nest-sills finches whistle
Or stooping pluck the downy thistle
How is the morn so gay and fair
Without his whistling in the air?

The world is calling, I must go,
How shall I know he did not pass
Barefooted in the shining grass?

The main topic of this novel is loss and told by the narrator Imogen recalling her tale some 30 years after her brother Johnny disappeared in an apparent swimming accident. However, parallel to this she reads from her great-grandmother's diary and the despair that she felt after her son Harry failed to return from WWI.

For most of the novel Imogen is a young, vulnerable teenager overshadowed by her older brother Johnny, liked by her father, ignored by her mother, and loved by Mathilde, the family's housekeeper. Johnny is athletic, handsome, and intelligent, a swimming champion and possible Olympian. Imogen is largely over-looked by her wealthy parents has a normal brother and sister relationship with Johnny.

Johnny brings home a charming German friend with whom Imogen falls in "love" as do other members of the family all bar Mathilde. When Imogen is confronted by a shocking revelation she can't handle it and becomes mute. She is then sent to a sanatorium to recover her mental health. Whilst there she is informed by her father that Johnny has drowned. Imogen does not accept it believing instead that he left to start a new life. Therefore she hopes that Johnny will read the book and return, her parents having died.

Throughout lengthy pages of her grandmother's journal and letters from her father are included. However, most of the so-called family "secrets" I was able to guess them long before their were actually revealed. On the plus side this is a relatively quick read with some poignant passages and I enjoyed the author's spare writing style. I just found it fairly predictable. ( )

Well, it is a novel, just one told from a first-person point of view and written as an open letter. Imogen's brother is supposedly dead (drowned), but because he is a champion swimmer, she doesn't believe it, and so she writes the book hoping he'll read it and come home. The timeline jumps back and forth, which at times was confusing, but it all came together at the end. There is a mess of family relationships, digging through great-grandmother's history, and some time spent in a mental institution. I found that half-way through the novel I wasn't sure I was enjoying it, but I kept reading because it was so short. In the end I was surprised by some of the twists, but not by others, and overall it was a good read. ( )

It is, in fact, a novel. It's a pretty OK novel. I wasn't stunned by it, though. What it DOES have is a good set of twisted personal relationships. What's the matter with it, then? Well, to be honest, I'm kind of sick of books about sad modern ladies who know too much about their great-grandmothers or whatever. I feel as though this idea of repeated fate through female generations is a tired trope in contemporary fiction, and I would like it to go away. I was more interested in the problems surrounding the modern-day characters than in the ones surrounding their World War One analogues. But whatever. It was OK. ( )

I was a little divided on this one, to be honest. Johnston's prose is as beautiful as ever. I love the sense of echoing and silence she sets up throughout the novel, generation echoing generation, the peculiar reverberations and the dying away which shows not only the decay of this particular family, but the decay of the Irish Ascendancy as a whole. The sense of healing and of distance is well-evoked, and it is easy to believe that these pains and hurts are ones which would take a life-time to heal.

That said, there is perhaps a little too much silence in this, too much absence. That might not have been so noticeable if the unfolding of the central mysteries of the novel had been more engaging—why Imogen lost the ability to speak; why the hostility towards her mother; what had happened to her brother; why her great-uncle had gone to the Great War—had not been so obvious, but I predicted exactly what was happening within the first forty to fifty pages. The characters, too, remained cyphers; we were simply not given enough even of the main character, Imogen, to make me feel like I had any knowledge of her by the time I finished the book. Maybe too much was elided in general; it was obvious to me that the family in this was coded as Irish Protestant—specifically Church of Ireland—but I don't know how clear that would be to someone who isn't Irish, and how much that would lessen the impact of certain aspects of the book.

Recommended, but with reservations. ( )