The Rain Before It Falls [Paperback]

 

 

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The Rain Before It Falls is a poetic exploration of mothers and daughters, and even grandmothers as it beautifully charts the progress of one Shropshire family from the War years through to the present day through a series of photographs. Upon her death at the age of seventy-three of her great-aunt Rosamund, the middle-aged Gil learns of the existence of a series of photos and four cassette jewel cases of tapes who Rosamund had apparently gifted to a girl named Imogen who Gil had met only once, more than twenty years ago.

Rosamund had left no children. Her longtime companion - a woman called Ruth - had died some years earlier, and her sister Sylvia was also dead and none of them had left any indication to the whereabouts of Imogen. Helped by her two daughters, Catharine and Elizabeth, Gil frantically tries to investigate, while also wondering what could possibly have motivated her enigmatic aunt to arrange such a strange and eccentric request.

If Gil is, by some chance, unable to locate the mysterious Imogen, Rosamund had requested that Ros listen to the tapes herself. So when an investigation into the location of Imogen comes to a dead-end, and with her thoughts drifting randomly, floating and un-tethered, Ros gathers Catharine and Elizabeth together to listen, all three women unwilling to turn their back on Rosamund's appeal.

What begins as the ramblings of an old woman speaking into a microphone alone in the sitting room of her bungalow in Shropshire, soon becomes touching story of a lifelong friendship of two cousins who were once so close that they could have been sisters and who endured decades together, both coming to be embroiled in unrequited live and failed marriages, and both enduring their fair share of hardship and pain.

Although the first photo is Rosamund as a child, living on the suburbs of Birmingham, it is the second photograph of a picnic and a family group taken at Wardon Farm in 1941, the home of her aunt and uncle, that becomes the core of the novel and where Rosamund meets the eleven-year-old Beatrix. Quickly becoming allies and sisters, and partners in crime, a caravan at the Farm becomes a place where they can both retreat and hide and to plot an escape attempt to run away together to Birmingham.

It is this act of rebellion that firmly cements Rosamund and Beatrix's friendship, the bond between them lasting throughout most their adult lives even as Rosamund becomes a sort of substitute mother to Beatrix's wayward and unloved daughter, Thea and later as she frantically tries to adopt Imogen, Thea's damaged off-spring. In the process, Rosamund's life steadily unfolds against a backdrop of a brutally repressive England of the 1950's and a prejudice that is so often subtle and unspoken, but unmistakably there, time and again over the years.

Rosalind is clearly captivated with Beatrix; she's Rosalind's best friend constantly orbiting her life in various ways over the years. Always the self-effacing stalwart, Rosalind is forced to into a confrontation with Beatrix and her bad marriages, and accident that nearly cripples her, and her neglect and mistreatment Thea. It's not surprising that Thea grows up feeling unwanted and worthless and incapable of emotion.

The novel is filled with the collateral damage of all the unsuitable relationships and bad choices that Beatrix, and later, Thea, makes. Even when Rosalind finds the person of her dreams, Beatrix cannot help but try and sabotage it. Much of the drama in the last half of the story revolves Thea, unaware of the twists and turns her narrative is about to take, a fragile sense of security underpinning everything she does, her life always on the verge of splintering forever into fragments.

In prose that reflects a sort of graceful abstractedness and also a steely English reserve, Coe brings to the forefront Rosalind's shadowy and nebulous emotions that are tempered with regret or jealousy. Rosamund readily admits that in making these tapes she's driven by the desire to give Imogen a sense of her own history, a sense of where she came from and of the forces that had made her.

Moving from Birmingham, to Shropshire and its surrounds, to swinging London in the sixties and the seventies, and then even onto Toronto Canada, The Rain Before it Falls is all about the nature of memory and how the patterns of existence can ultimately shape how we see and how we relate to each other. Gil finally recognizes this when she finally connects the events of Rosalind's life with family dog that inexplicably runs away - first Beatrix in pursuit, then Imogen, mother and granddaughter racing against the odds, almost fifty years apart.

Rosalind's photographs do remain at the novel's core, her descriptions of them indeed quite exquisite: the blazing gold fields of Shropshire; a boat on the Serpentine in Hyde Park; the gaunt and somber silhouettes of Warden Farm standing out blackly in the moonlight. In the end, this is an exact and perfectly tempered book, and serves as not just a testament to one family's struggles throughout the decades, but also a testimony to the sometimes-troubling intricacies of the human condition. Mike Leonard May 08.

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