A review of The Distant Hours by Kate Morton.

Edie Burchill struggles: with her low-paying and inconsequential editing job, with her failed romance, but most of all with her relationship with her distant mother. Everything is turned upside down when a mystery letter turns up. It had been written during the war, but was lost, and finally was delivered to her mother 50 years late. Her mother reads the letter and reacts extravagantly. Edie is intrigued and sets out on a quest to find out more about the writer of the letter and its context. Talking to her mother is impossible, so she begins her quest in secret.

This is the premise for young Australian writer Kate Morton’s latest novel. It looks to follow on from the success of The Shifting Fog and The Forgotten Garden and follows the same Gothic formula, what she calls her Gothic ‘tropes’: “a secret, a house in which that secret lies hidden, waiting to be called forth by memory and nostalgia, and most significantly, a gentle teasing collusion with the reader who is willing to be drawn into a not-quite-real past world”.

There are also hints of ghosts, intense romantic failures and lots of references to wild weather and the dark. All her novels are set in England, where Morton studied, and far-removed from where she lives in Brisbane.

Most of the action in The Distant Hours occurs in the fictional Milderhurst Castle, Kent, owned by a trio of elderly spinster sisters, one of whom is mentally imbalanced (a reference to Jane Eyre perhaps). Edie senses that the clue to her mother’s emotional aloofness has its roots in her connection with these sisters. She discovers that her mother stayed with them for 18 months during the war, when the children of London were evacuated to escape The Blitz (remember the start of The Lion, Witch & the Wardrobe?).

She enters eagerly into the quest, aided by her elderly employer Herbert, and a healthy imagination; but of course, begins to dredge up long-buried memories, pain from the past, which begins to disturb the present.

This is a LONG read, but Morton holds it all together by jumping between the war years and the modern setting, 1992, and tracking the development in Edie’s relationship with her mother.

While spiritual matters are not front and centre in this book, there are some interesting insights into the characters, especially Percy, the eldest sister. “There was something fundamentally broken at the heart of Percy Blythe, something queer and defective and utterly unlikeable.” This brokenness is something we all share, and which, in our moments of self-honesty, we can see clearly. It is the brokenness of secrets and cover-ups and wrongs and failings and rage.

In the novel such brokenness is extinguished by an attempt to right some old wrongs, and finally death. However, there is a sense of the inadequacy and incompleteness of this, which comes through the narrative.

Percy’s father is wracked by his weaknesses and guilt, and turns to the Catholic Church, which promises absolution in return for a decent portion of his estate.

Percy turns away from God, who she feels it not well represented by the church (often true!) and because he has disappointed her personally when her lover marries another. “Then and there she became a non-believer, standing in the village church… watching as Mr Gordon, the vicar, pronounced Harry Rogers and Lucy Middleton man and wife.”

Once again, the premise is that the God who should satisfy the character’s needs and whims, has failed to deliver… so is rejected, and the character moves on…

Once again in literature, the true nature of things is inverted by a character in the story; that the sovereign God has proven unwilling to be controlled by humans should not surprise us, especially if we only acknowledge him at our time of greatest need or disappointment.

There are some slight disconnects in this book: a lack of clarity about the maturity of Edie’s mother while she was staying with the sisters, Herbert’s dog appears then disappears, there is some plodding in the middle… However, that is offset by some beautiful prose, and plot twists and turns make it an absorbing read.