This new novel builds on Sadie Jones’s reputation as a deft
historical novelist.
The Uninvited Guests
Sadie Jones’s engaging tale of life before the First World
War is intriguing on a number of levels.
The Uninvited Guests (288
pages, Harper, $14.99) tells the story of an almost well-heeled family
struggling to keep Sterne, the country house they love. As Edward Swift, step-father and
husband, goes to the city to attempt to secure a loan, the remaining family
members try to put a fine face on the situation and celebrate the birthday of
Emerald, the oldest daughter.
There are three children in the family, Horace Torrington’s
children, it seems: Emerald is a girl just poised on becoming a beautiful young
woman; her older brother Clovis is twenty and utterly bored with his life, and
especially with his new step-father who seems unable to connect with the boy;
finally, there is Isabel, or Smudge, who is the creative child who spends her
time drawing her animals and walking on the roof.
Emerald and Clovis understand each other, and when they go
off together riding their favorite horses, they break through the tensions of
family life and seem to connect.
Often, though, they are at cross-purposes because Clovis simply does not
care.
Charlotte Torrington Swift is a nervous woman who loves the
house and dreads its loss. She has
little faith in her husband’s ability to save the place. She spends a lot of
the novel locked away in her room, letting the servants Florence and Myrtle
keep the family fed and protected.
The shaky equilibrium of the family is shaken further when old
friends—Patience and Ernest Sutton—visit to help celebrate Emerald’s birthday. These
visitors both challenge the Torringtons with memories of the people they used
to be and awake in them a kind of sexual desire they have not experienced
before. Emerald finds herself
gazing into the bespectacled eyes of Ernest in hopes of finding the boy she
knew, and in doing so, she falls deeply in love. Clovis finds he wants to spend every minute with Patience,
but he is not quite sure why.
As party preparations get under way, an odd assortment of
people arrive at the house, with the story that there has been a train crash
and a number of people will have to be accommodated. The family shunts the group into a back room and tries to
figure out what to do; but one of the group singles himself out as a special
friend of the family.
Things go from bad to worse when the number of uninvited guests
increases and the family begins to feel embattled. Even worse, the guest who had seemed to single himself out
as a friend becomes a terror, introducing the kind of drinking game that leaves
everyone devastated, but not before he has attacked Charlotte and accused her
of being unfaithful to her husband.
After they come out of this drunken haze, they manage to
find beds for all the guests and even to cope with Smudge’s brilliant idea of
getting her pony into the upper floors of the house. Getting the horse down becomes a family
enterprise that brings all the young people together.
In the morning the guests are gone and they begin to put the
house back together. Edward Swift
comes home with a shocking tale of a train crash, and everyone has to wonder
where those quests actually came from.
The real question, though, is whether Edward has found the money to save
the house.
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