Book review: The White Lie

IT WAS Freud who first developed the concept of the “family romance” with his Oedipal and Electra theories, but long before him, novelists like George Eliot and the Brontës were exploring family tensions and their impact on individuals’ lives.

Andrea Gillies is no stranger to family drama – her first book, Keeper, was a non-fiction work about caring for her mother-in-law who had Alzheimer’s. It won both the Orwell prize and the Wellcome Trust book prize.

Now she has turned her hand to fiction, and family drama rears its head once again, just as in those 19th-century classics. This isn’t to say that she is deliberately channelling the likes of Eliot and the Brontës in her debut novel, just that she has a similarly superb sense of family undercurrents and distortions, and their terrible consequences. Her story is told by Michael Salter, a 19-year-old who is missing, presumed drowned. Or rather, drowned by his aunt Ursula, with whom he was having a sexual relationship. Or was he? And did he really drown, or did he fabricate his own death in revenge at the family who kept its most important secret from him?

Michael’s ghostly presence shimmers above a tale with two deaths at its heart: the possible death of Michael, after he was seen arguing with his aunt in a boat, just before she knocked him into the water and hit him on the side of his head with an oar; and the actual death, many years previously, of Ursula’s infant brother, Sebastian, who also drowned. The whole family are horribly intertwined in both deaths, because they are inheritors of a large Highland estate where they mostly still live. Indeed, on the day that Ursula comes running in to say she has killed Michael, most of her family are present to witness her confession.

This family has, though, some very real grievances embedded within it. Gillies teases out what happened on the day of Michael’s disappearance – the family agree not to dredge the loch where he was last seen as this might create gossip and ultimately get Ursula into trouble. They gather together to put about the story that Michael simply decided to leave, after writing a note that we never see, all to protect the rather simple, disturbed young woman at the heart of it. Given that the family once had to cope with the tragic drowning of Ursula’s brother Sebastian, it is perhaps understandable that they cannot cope with another tragedy. But the truth will always out, and this is what really drives the narrative.

Gillies has assembled a very large cast here. The main players are Michael and his single mother Ottilie, whom he used to fight because she always refused to tell him who his real father was; Edith, the grandmother of Michael, wife of Henry, the estate’s present owner, and mother to Ottilie, her twin sister Joan and the strange childlike Ursula; “Mog” and “Pod”, two of Joan’s four children as well as her husband, Euan; and Alan Dixon, the interloper, son of the estate’s gardener, who may or may not be Michael’s real father. It is Alan who witnesses the altercation between Ursula and Michael on the boat, just before he disappears for good.

Such a large cast can be hard to manage, and hard to make distinguishable. Gillies gives the twin sisters, Joan and Ottilie, a lifelong enmity and completely contrasting personalities, and Mog takes over the narrative from time to time to establish her true feelings for her cousin Michael and to wonder if his disappearance/death is the reason her life is such a mess.

Alan comes into his own more in the second half of the book as the revelations begin to come thick and fast, but sometimes it is hard to distinguish between Vita, the grandmother of them all, while and Edith, Euan and Henry only take on any flesh towards the end.

It makes for quite a gossipy tale, all these family members discussing what may or may not have happened. It’s essential to the narrative, though, that people should talk in circles around a subject but never dealing with it straight: this infects the structure of the novel, which also has a circularity to it. There’s an echo of Virginia Woolf, especially To the Lighthouse, that lifts Gillies’ work above the average family drama. The fact that she also keeps a tight hold of the gossipy strands of her story is a great credit to her powers, too, as well as her ability to keep her readers guessing the truth to the end. This is an unusual, unsettling, often lovely story that plumbs the depths of what family means. It is a fine debut novel.

• The White Lie

by Andrea Gillies

Short Books, 320pp, £12.99