The Landscape of Love, Sally Beauman

What would I make of this book which I bought at the market for 50p, such a pristine copy that I thought it had been very recently published (actually 2005), whose author I had never heard of? I begrudged every minute I wasn’t reading it.

I’ve read so many books of this type that I’ve devised a formula. Begin with an old house; it should be in Suffolk, Norfolk or Dorset. Enter some present day characters with a connection to the house. Hint at some past tragedy which has affected all the characters for the rest of their lives. Go backwards and forwards in time, perhaps using old diaries and letters. Find out eventually what really happened. There you are folks, plotline for a bestseller. The Landscape of Love, though, is so much more than the sum of these parts.

The old house is a former abbey in Suffolk; rambling, crumbling in parts and ghost-ridden by nuns, according to those who sense their presence. We begin the story in the summer of 1967, while the Mortland family live there. Gramps owns the house. A younger son, he chose it as his inheritance, intending to farm the land. Unfortunately he’s not been very successful and money is running out. His son Guy is dead and daughter-in-law Stella shares the house with her three daughters. Stella is a brilliant cook but out of it in other respects, seeming never to have got over her husband’s death. Julia and Finn are stunningly beautiful and clever. They have a much younger sister, Maisie, who narrates the first section of the book. One should be alerted, by the way she talks to the nuns, that she’s a child with problems, yet somehow her narration is accepted at face value.
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