Trelawney Castle: seat of the Earls of Trelawney for over 800 years; an architectural palimpsest, and once the jewel in the crown of the Trelawney estate. Recent generations, however, have been better at spending money rather than making it and now their beloved home is a crumbling prison. Heir Kitto and his wife Jane both do what they can, but are barely just keeping their heads above water. Their ruin will be hastened by three unexpected events: the appearance of a new relation, an odious and unscrupulous American hedge fund manager determined to exact revenge, and the financial crash of 2008.
In her debut novel, The Improbability of Love, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Baileys Women’s Prize For Fiction and winner of that year’s Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, Rothschild turned her comic, satiric, and romantic eye on the Art world. A world that, as a former chair of London’s National Gallery, she was well placed to comment on. In House of Trelawney, she turns that eye to the worlds of the British aristocracy and high finance. Which, as the daughter of a Baron, member of a prominent banking family, and non-executive director of various financial institutions, she is also well placed to comment on.
Her style has been compared to comic writers such as Waugh and Mitford, which are apt in terms of both style and milieu, but comparisons can also be made to Austen and Dickens, as she shares their ability to create comic characters and to then put those characters in situations that allows the author to make satirical/social commentary. Current Trelawney heir Kitto, for instance, is almost the archetypal bumbling, ineffectual aristocrat: financially incompetent and adding to their debts with his numerous unsuccessful investments. This is in contrast to his sister Blaze, who is a brilliant mathematician and financier, but Trelawney tradition dictates that younger sons and daughters are exiled from the family home at age eighteen to make their own way in the world. She’s also the only one to recognise the trouble brewing on the horizon but, like Cassandra before her, is unheeded and mocked for it. Some do come across more like caricatures, Kitto’s parents for instance, who insist on living as if nothing has changed, becoming an example of a bygone era preserved in aspic, or Thomlinson Sleet, who is pretty much a stereotypical arrogant, odious and near-villainous hedge fund manager. But it can be argued that this enhances the comedy and, though they may be lacking comparatively lacking in complexity, they’re rarely dull. Tonally, her writing is light but not lightweight: witty but sincere when a moment needs to be played straight. She deploys her knowledge with deft touch but uses the arcane incomprehensibleness of financial jargon to her advantage, adding to the comedic tone.
At the heart of the story is the relationship between three women: dependable Jane, the much put-upon and underappreciated wife of Kitto, whose whole identity has become subsumed by the house; Blaze, successful but unhappy, sure that love is something that happens to other people, despite the fact that fellow financier – the enigmatic Joshua Wolfe – appears to be interested in her; Anastasia, former friend to both Jane and Blaze, expelled from their lives years previously due to scandal and betrayal and yet who still exerts the gravitational pull of a black hole. Both Kitto and Sleet were in love with her (and, in the case of Kitto, still is), her letters to Jane and Blaze are the inciting incident and turns out to be what links most of the threads together. One will rediscover herself, one will find love and one will exact revenge.
Your mileage may vary when it comes to privileged characters, the subject of finance and all the money talk that goes with it, but House of Trelawney is an intelligent and entertaining romp.
House of Trelawney is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers.
Will you be picking up House of Trelawney? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
From the author of The Improbability of Love a dazzling novel both satirical and moving, about an eccentric, dysfunctional family of English aristocrats, and their crumbling stately home that reminds us how the lives and hopes of women can still be shaped by the ties of family and love.
For more than seven hundred years, the vast, rambling Trelawney Castle in Cornwall–turrets, follies, a room for every day of the year, four miles of corridors and 500,000 acres–was the magnificent and grand “three dimensional calling card” of the earls of Trelawney. By 2008, it is in a complete state of ruin due to the dulled ambition and the financial ineptitude of the twenty-four earls, two world wars, the Wall Street crash, and inheritance taxes. Still: the heir to all of it, Kitto, his wife, Jane, their three children, their dog, Kitto’s ancient parents, and his aunt Tuffy Scott, an entomologist who studies fleas, all manage to live there and keep it going. Four women dominate the story: Jane; Kitto’s sister, Blaze, who left Trelawney and made a killing in finance in London, the wildly beautiful, seductive, and long-ago banished Anastasia and her daughter, Ayesha. When Anastasia sends a letter announcing that her nineteen-year-old daughter, Ayesha, will be coming to stay, the long-estranged Blaze and Jane must band together to take charge of their new visitor–and save the house of Trelawney. But both Blaze and Jane are about to discover that the house itself is really only a very small part of what keeps the family together.
