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Lies and Loyalties

Blood will out

Rachel Billington
Orion, 341pp, £18.99,

Andrew Barrow

Tuesday, 8th April 2008

This brilliantly murky novel describes a nightmarish ten days in the life of a famous, highly successful but deeply dysfunctional family.

Somehow Rachel Billington has created an utterly gripping page-turner, rich in subplots, without making any of the five siblings or attendant figures particularly attractive. My sympathy, such as it is, lies not with the decent priestly brother — indeed I slightly dreaded his prayerful appearances — but with the deranged and defiant Charlie and the pathetic drug-addicted prostitute he’s married in order to save. Charlie soon turns out not to be dead at all but alive and kicking, a Shakespearean clown and Latin-intoning maniac who comes up with wonderful home truths, causes a hullabaloo wherever he is and is finally seen shouting and swearing as he crosses Westminster Bridge to have lunch with his whistle- blowing brother, suddenly the most famous MP in the land.

There are some interesting swipes at the police in this book — one officer wears a black wig with a ‘funny little fringe’ — and the bogus current notion of ‘community’, but no real absolution. In spite of a wealth of religious quotation built into the text, the only light at the end of the tunnel comes with the suggestion that, like the poor old patriarch, we are all lonely seafarers with long journeys ahead of us.