Daughters of the House

Author: Michele Roberts

Publisher: Virago / 1993

Pages: 172

This novel was the winner of the W H Smith Literary Award and later made it to the short list of the Booker Prize.

The author is Michele Roberts, who is half-French and is thus well-suited to explore the contrasts and similarities between the two nations.

The book resounds with the clash of opposing notions - pagan/Christian, physical/spiritual, body/soul. Her story tells of the deeper opposition between lies, cowardice and terror on the one hand and rapturous descriptions of everyday delights - a fresh loaf, a pretty soap dish, smooth bedding.

We meet the skeletons right at the beginning of the book but we forget all about them as the story unfolds.

The story is set in a house in a village in Normandy, where two cousins, Therese and Leonie (who is half-English), squabble, pry, grow intimate while loading grapes and plums on toast on a nest of vine-leaves lining a glazed dish.

Food, its preparation and consumption, distracts the sensuous and greedy Leonie from her dark suspicions.

Many times this domestic routine is juxtaposed with a conversation that uncovers a grim corner of history. A woman helper, steadily beating cream in a bowl, tells almost matter-of-factly about the village having a lot of Jews living there but for the German occupiers these were just Jews that the Germans hated and wanted to get rid of.

Many times we get this contrast between delight and a shuddering disturbance in the narrative.

We first meet the cousins on the edge of middle-age - Leonie plump and glossy in her proprietary importance, and Therese, who has become a nun, desiccated and fidgety. The story takes us back to their childhood and shows how a mother's illness and early death, combined with the messy confusion surrounding her parentage, turned Therese towards a dangerous soulfulness and, in adolescence, a raving religiosity.

Both girls claim to have witnessed a vision at a dilapidated woodland shrine, but Therese's vision of Our Lady dressed in blue is taken more seriously than the dark-haired, golden-skinned figure seen by Leonie, who might be the Jewish woman who was shot there. The acceptance by the village of the version of the Lady as she appeared to Therese turns her towards a vocation quite unlike what her cousin saw and turns towards a vocation that later becomes unstuck.

Roberts acknowledges as a major inspiration the book L'histoire d'une ame by Therese Martin, who was canonised on 17 May 1925, known all over the world as the "Little Flower". This Therese, in her autobiography The Story of a Soul is full of words like soul, god, son, miracle, and so on.

Leonie who still goes to mass on Sundays, and comes back home to an apéritif and the smell of roast lamb, comes across as a more sympathetic person.