Some years ago, journalist Andrea Gillies was struggling to write a novel. The enemy of her promise was a full-time job; she was caring for her mother-in-law, who had Alzheimer's. The book that emerged, Keeper, was a vivid factual account of that relationship, a meditation on the nature of consciousness and identity as much as on dementia and its treatment. Its scope – from science to politics – won it both the Wellcome Trust book prize and the Orwell prize.
Gillies described in Keeper her frustration at not finding the concentration for fiction, cursing her inability to break the surface of her imagination. She saw herself as an insect, a waterboatman, stranded on the meniscus, above mesmerising depths. As it turns out, that metaphor was significant. The White Lie, Andrea Gillies's debut novel, is the story of a family allegedly cursed by watery death.
Peattie, the run-down Highland estate of the Salter family, encompasses a large loch. Much like Susie Salmon in Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, this book's narrator, Michael, tells us in the opening sentence that he is dead. That much, he adds, he knows for sure. He introduces the bereaved family, one by one, beginning with Ottilie, his artist mother, as she wanders in the wood by the waterside on the 14th anniversary of his disappearance.
The local myth has it that the loch claims Salter victims, but members of the family also invent stories and rework old narratives to disguise guilt and shroud the unbearable. At various points over the years four generations co-exist in the draughty old mansion and satellite properties of Peattie; they are linked by a matrix of half-truths and agonised silence. Resentments compost and a secretive pathology establishes itself.
As narrator, Michael, as in his life, is one moment present and then mysteriously silent. The story slides between decades, and fragments of information emerge only to prove contradictory. The parade of various relations can occasionally be confusing and a judicious editorial cull of the odd cousin might have helped. Yet, each apparent detour from the central premise of why and how Michael is absent grips in its own way, plumbing further the measure of what – beyond events – makes a family tragedy and why people lie.
Gillies's descriptions are precise, particularly of gardens, food and clothes, and often wry. Despite the grandeur of their surroundings, the Salters survive largely on toast and cold cuts. Gillies relishes the absurdities of dialogue (the precisely recalled domestic encounters in Keeper had to be skilful re-creation). In the novel, the slow torture of barely enunciated rivalries and feuds keeps the Salters – including solitary Ottilie and Joan, her angry, materialistic twin, unpredictable sister Ursula, distanced parents Edith and Henry and mischievous, paper-fragile grandmother Vita – at odds in a particularly cruel, sad and funny northern European way.
As recent television successes prove, the posh house saga hasn't lost its appeal. The White Lie is a story of decline, naturally, of a crumbling hierarchy taking desperate measures to save face (and the bloodline and the silver) before the hordes sweep them away. Yet, more than that, it is an account of the unreliability of personal history. Is a family story true because it is repeated? Does it matter in the end if the "truth" is revealed, if the lie has been lived? As Michael observes: "So many of our assumptions in life are based on the things people tell each other, but the things people tell each other can all too easily amount only to a line of mythology, misinterpreting itself successively through the generations uncontested." The White Lie as fiction develops Keeper's ideas of the fragility and fluidity of identity. We all self-mythologise.
Just as the novel reveals itself to be more than a who- and how-dunnit, so its resolution may leave those hoping for a neat dénouement dissatisfied. A big set-piece occasion would seem to promise catharsis and Poirot-style explanation; in fact, it is slightly anti-climactic. Yet the strength of this immersive story is that it does not require neat revelations. The White Lieremains, even with its detours, a page-turner. It is also, finally, verymoving.
As a judge on the Orwell prize, I was so impressed by the originality of Keeper that I wondered why Andrea Gillies would still want to write fiction. Her instinct was right, though, to dive deep into that imagination.
