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Grandmother’s Footsteps

Problems of keeping mum

Charlotte Moore
Penguin, 274pp, £17.99,

Molly Guinness

Tuesday, 5th February 2008

Molly Guinness reviews Charlotte Moore's new book

Hester’s motives are often similarly mysterious, but in this case it can work well. Hester is 40 and childless; as she sees her options narrowing, she finds decisions difficult and, because she has to choose the best of a bad lot, doesn’t know what she wants. Her relationship with her mother is amusing; Hester is obsessively inscrutable with Verity and has always refused to yield any information on inward or outward goings on. There is a good moment when she would like to walk round the garden of her old home one last time before it is sold, but cannot give her mother the satisfaction of discerning emotion in her. However, the times when a person is at their least expressive are not the best ones for gaining a sense of character, and Hester’s other appearances do not give much more guidance. She may be cool and impenetrable, but one would think that an omniscient narrator might give us a few more clues.

Character may be underplayed, but atmosphere certainly is not; in August there is a ‘syrup-coloured light that turns the afternoon into the best kind of childhood experience, like a Polaroid of memory’. Evelyn and Verity are very keen on gardening, so outdoor scenes tend to get a little lyrical: ‘in the orchard, the greengages were dropping off the trees like blobs of jam,’ and so on. Moore has a visual imagination, and is scrupulous about describing colours correctly; Hester buys a dress the colour of a

skinned peach, but with more colour in it. It was a colour you might see in a sunset … not in the core of the sunset, but in the shiny sky above, for the little purple clouds to swim in. Or else it was the colour of a just-risen moon.

These flights of fancy are not too frequent, and for the most part Grandmother’s Footsteps offers some poignant portraits of women who are not quite happy, and tells their stories with sensitive restraint.

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