Secrets of the house: The Two Houses & The Hoarder

I’ve recently been reading two second novels in which a woman sets out to uncover a family’s tragic secret lodged within a large historic house, aided and abetted by a presence that might or might not be a ghost. In the first, the woman and her husband buy a crumbling manor house as a weekend retreat from London; in the second, the woman is employed in the London mansion as carer for a man who can’t throw anything away. Both have strong voices and characterisation, with beautiful descriptions, but differ sufficiently that you could happily read both. For other novels about mysterious houses see Fell by Jenn Ashworth and post What’s haunting these houses?

The Two Houses by Fran Cooper

Grieving for thwarted expectations, successful ceramicist Jay spends the summer in bed. Simon, her architect husband, decides she needs a bolthole out of London, a country weekend retreat. They head north, househunting, where Jay falls in love with a most unlikely property: a dilapidated 18th-century manor house now divided into two. Soon they’ve bought Two Houses and, setting aside their London life for a few weeks to begin renovations, Simon plans to restore the missing central section as a studio for his wife. But she seems more interested in resurrecting the ghosts of the past than with preparing the house for modern occupation and, when Simon has to return to London for a meeting, Jay stays behind. It’s rather unfortunate that this coincides with a shocking discovery that points to a historic crime.
 
The residents of the nearby village are cold and unfriendly, but there’s a reason they don’t welcome their new neighbours from the metropolis. As Jay investigates the house’s history, it becomes apparent that some secrets are best left buried in the past.
 
Fran Cooper writes beautifully, and the landscape and characters, both major and minor, are well fleshed out. For me, the incessant rain and negativity of the locals dips now and then into melodrama and an Othering of the grim north that made this northerner smile. But it comes together in a satisfying way with the author’s empathy for her characters finally apparent. Fran Cooper’s second novel is about the making and breaking of both buildings and people; thanks to Hodder & Stoughton for my review copy.

The Hoarder by Jess Kidd

Care worker Maud Drennan is assigned the case of Cathal Flood after his previous carer is dispatched from the substantial London property with a hurley stick. Tasked with clearing a space amidst the twenty-odd years of accumulated clutter and grime to cook for the curmudgeonly elderly widower, she can’t help being charmed by him and the house’s mysterious past. Egged on by her agoraphobic neighbour, and her curiosity aroused by the discovery of family photographs with the faces of Cathal’s wife and unacknowledged daughter burnt out, Maud embarks on a quest for the truth through the Great Wall of National Geographics in the corridor to the labyrinth of macabre curiosities beyond.
 
A sharp and witty voice is Jess Kidd’s second novel’s greatest strength, with delightfully succinct evocations of character and place. The joyous gumption enables the reader to accept the unlikely (for example, grounds large enough to contain an icehouse in suburban London and the authorities’ ability to relocate Cathal to residential care without his consent) and pseudo-supernatural elements (including the host of saintly apparitions revealing and concealing useful information to twists and turns to the plot). Although I admired how the author introduced the parallels with the missing sister in Maud’s past, around the middle I’d have welcomed a greater variation in emotional tone is to emphasise the pathos of the characters’ situations overall. But it leads to a satisfying conclusion, with both Maud and neighbour Renata psychologically in a better place.
 
Thanks to Canongate for my review copy. For another novel about hoarders and overzealous collectors, see my reviews of Making Space and Lost Time Accidents.