The Rain Before It Falls

I needed a day to process this book after finishing it. This is hands down, one of the most well-written novels I have read in a long time. The character depth is astounding! I felt as though I knew these people, that their story could have been in my family. Jonathan Coe's highly acclaimed "The Rain Before It Falls" is an epic tale of love, loss and above all family. When Gill cleans finds out her Aunt has passed away she is left to deal with her estate. What she finds is a series of tapes that her Aunt Rosamond had recorded with instructions that they be delivered to a girl - now a woman- named Imogen. Gill vaguely remembers Imogen from her Aunt Rosamonds 50th birthday party, but aside from that occasion knows not much about her. Gill is unable to locate Imogen, so she and her daughters go ahead and listen to the tapes. What follows is a description of 20 photographs. How amazing! It was like looking through a photo album and having all the circumstances surrounding those photos told to you. What unfolds is a story of inevitability. A series of events all seemingly linked, and tragic at their very core. What comes from those events is Imogen, a little girl that lost her vision in an awful accident when she was 3 years old. This book is a must read! You will find yourself reading this book rather quickly. The emotions Coe evokes are strong, and you will be compelled to continue on.

This book should be made into a film. And I found it far easier to read than "Atonement," which was too wordy and dense for me (and I'm a Henry James fan). First of all, I was surprised to read here that some critics didn't like the device of using photographs to tell the story to a blind girl. To me, that was one of the best things about the writing, ingenious and entertaining. I couldn't wait to hear what the next image would be - and yet I didn't want to leave the tale from the last one. Also, I enjoyed the dark and perverse interactions of the protagonists. The main character, the one telling the story, reveals her own dark side toward the end, but I don't want to spoil it for future readers. It's a fascinating tale, one of the best books I've read in a long time, but it does leave one with a peculiar, "unfinished" feeling, though the "facts" appear to have been laid out and brought to a "satisfying" conclusion. Still - as a writer myself - I found the theme of life's being a giant mystery actually more satisfying than a pat ending. Strange, strange book - and yet it also tapped into my own life's story in ways I won't go into here. I wonder if other readers felt the same way.

The Rain Before It Falls is a poetic exploration of mothers and daughters, and even grandmothers as it beautifully charts the progress of one Shropshire family from the War years through to the present day through a series of photographs. Upon her death at the age of seventy-three of her great-aunt Rosamund, the middle-aged Gil learns of the existence of a series of photos and four cassette jewel cases of tapes who Rosamund had apparently gifted to a girl named Imogen who Gil had met only once, more than twenty years ago. Rosamund had left no children. Her longtime companion - a woman called Ruth - had died some years earlier, and her sister Sylvia was also dead and none of them had left any indication to the whereabouts of Imogen. Helped by her two daughters, Catharine and Elizabeth, Gil frantically tries to investigate, while also wondering what could possibly have motivated her enigmatic aunt to arrange such a strange and eccentric request. If Gil is, by some chance, unable to locate the mysterious Imogen, Rosamund had requested that Ros listen to the tapes herself. So when an investigation into the location of Imogen comes to a dead-end, and with her thoughts drifting randomly, floating and un-tethered, Ros gathers Catharine and Elizabeth together to listen, all three women unwilling to turn their back on Rosamund's appeal. What begins as the ramblings of an old woman speaking into a microphone alone in the sitting room of her bungalow in Shropshire, soon becomes touching story of a lifelong friendship of two cousins who were once so close that they could have been sisters and who endured decades together, both coming to be embroiled in unrequited live and failed marriages, and both enduring their fair share of hardship and pain. Although the first photo is Rosamund as a child, living on the suburbs of Birmingham, it is the second photograph of a picnic and a family group taken at Wardon Farm in 1941, the home of her aunt and uncle, that becomes the core of the novel and where Rosamund meets the eleven-year-old Beatrix. Quickly becoming allies and sisters, and partners in crime, a caravan at the Farm becomes a place where they can both retreat and hide and to plot an escape attempt to run away together to Birmingham. It is this act of rebellion that firmly cements Rosamund and Beatrix's friendship, the bond between them lasting throughout most their adult lives even as Rosamund becomes a sort of substitute mother to Beatrix's wayward and unloved daughter, Thea and later as she frantically tries to adopt Imogen, Thea's damaged off-spring. In the process, Rosamund's life steadily unfolds against a backdrop of a brutally repressive England of the 1950's and a prejudice that is so often subtle and unspoken, but unmistakably there, time and again over the years. Rosalind is clearly captivated with Beatrix; she's Rosalind's best friend constantly orbiting her life in various ways over the years. Always the self-effacing stalwart, Ros

I think this is a wonderfully written novel that will have a difficult time receiving a wide readership because it's one of the most depressing novels I've read since Madame Bovary. Dysfunctional mothers, suicide, love and friendships rejected, death, poverty, abuse, and unhappiness at every turn of the page. And yet, Coe's writing made me reread passages several times and even want to steal certain turns of phrase for my own blog! I did read some of the reviews of this book from London newspapers on my library's databases, and some did not like the author's use of the 20 photographs that Rosamond describes to her blind friend Imogen in the attempt to help Imogen "see" and thus understand her history. It seems that it is 50% that, but ends up, of course, being another half Rosamond's effort to review her own life and justify the choices she made along the way. And just as Rosamond and Imogen have a little discussion about what the rain is "before it falls", and Imogen, with the innocence of a child answers that it isn't real, so too is life before it is lived. You can sit at the end of life and with 20-20 hindsight perhaps expect to determine if you did the right things, but it is just hindsight. So, the irony is that even when we come to the end and can see the past, Rosamund is still uncertain in many instances if she did the right things at the right times. Gosh, all that to say I really liked the use of the photographs as a plot construction tool. I found myself tuning in to looking at the scenes as if I were responsible for a stage construction. If you enjoy "literary fiction" and don't mind a downpour of emotional content, this novel won't be just another blur of a read. The characters and the setting are quite unforgettable.

This book has so much to recommend it, it is hard to know where to begin. Coe is a master of mood, character, and plot, as evidenced in this book as well as in his other fine books. But whereas The Liar's Club and its sequal, Closed Circle, focus on a group of male friends, this is a story of women joined by not always nourishing family ties. The structure alone is intriguing, with family photographs providing impetus to an old woman's memory, as she dictates her past into a tape recorder, in order to reveal to a younger woman her own history.