The Chimney Sweeper's Boy by
Barbara Vine
pbk out March 99
(Penguin)
at £5.99
Best-selling and adored novelist, Gerald Candless discovered early on that success and fame allows him to speak his mind, and manipulate people to get what he wants. On the surface, only mildly brutal, nothing that can't be forgiven of a genius, and never more than this in front of his adored and adoring daughters, the effects on those closest to him have nevertheless been profound.
Gerald's domineering personality holds the family together. He and the children (now grown up) take delight in their shared sense of intellectual superiority and petty snobbishness, playing childish parlour games to test their visitors' worthiness to enter their charmed circle. But Candless's sudden death from a heart attack turns this world upside down.
Ursula, Gerald's long-suffering wife, freed from her husband's tyranny, doesn't seem to be behaving is a way expected of a grieving widow. And Sarah, deeply shocked by her father's death, is asked by her father's publisher to write a biography of the great man. Nothing of note is know by any of his close family, so ? has to track down long-lost relatives to tell her more. But what she finds is that Gerald Candless died at the age of 7. Her father was not Gerald Candless at all. Why would he take on the name of a dead boy?
With a mounting feeling of unease, the story behind Candless's subterfuge is slowly revealed. A hint here, a word there, and the whole fabrication that was Candless's life has to be re-assessed. Barbara Vine is a master at revealing the reality beneath the surface. In this multi-layered tale of pain, guilt, passion and betrayal, she exposes and explores her characters' lives and psyches so deftly that what starts as an inquiry into the reasons for a boorish, selfish man to change his identify and lie to his family, ends with a totally unexpected truth and an overwhelming sense of sadness that one generation's intolerance can have such a deep and reverberating effect on generations to come.
A masterfully crafted and suspenseful novel. One of the best.
