The Beacon by Susan Hill

I am always attracted to books by Susan Hill, a writer of wide range. She writes the Simon Serrailler detective series, she is the author of the ghost classic The Woman in Black and the sequel to Rebecca, Mrs. de Winter. She has won the Somerset Maugham Award, The Whitbread, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and the Nestle Smarties Book Prize, which I assume includes a lifetime of all you can eat Smarties.

I am still thinking about this novel, with an ending do not wish to believe. It's a deceptively simple story of four siblings raised in a bleak English north country farmhouse. As they grew up, Colin married and moved a town over, Berenice married as well, while May returns to work on the farm and take care of her aging parents after trying to live in London, after the early promise and hopes of attending college didn't work out. Frank is the one that got away, moving off and marrying into a rich family. Always the shy, quiet one, he shocks family, friends, and their community by writing what is purported to be a true account of terrible childhood abuse at the hands of both his parents and siblings. Having read about them growing up, I don't see how that's possible, and Frank even sometimes admits that it's fiction. The repercussions have shamed the family within the community for years, so they are surprised when he shows up to his mother's funeral uninvited.

Very well written, she leaves things unsaid, her revelations about the characters prompting questions rather than answers. I was as outraged with Frank as May, and wonder about the ending. I wouldn't have acted as she did. I'm left thinking about May, picturing her at her farm, and I wonder how she is. That she created living characters is a testament to good writing, a novel The Guardian called "an almost perfect little literary novel", the reviewer also left eternally wondering...

My other reviews for Susan Hill:

Black Sheep

The Mist In The Mirror

The Woman in Black

The Small Hand

A Kind Man

2008 / Hardcover / 154 pages