The Ruins
This is a long and richly woven book, written with the assurance of a seasoned storyteller, yet it is Becky Docton’s debut novel. Lucie, a bewildered seven-year-old, newly arrived in England, is delivered by her mother, Ruth, to a cousin, Clifford, at a railway station. Ruth walks over the railway bridge to the platform and never looks back.
Clifford is a tall young man hideously wounded in the Great War, and he takes Lucie to live with him and his wife, Enid, at the family’s country seat known as ‘The Ruins’, an apt name, as it turns out. Both Clifford and Enid are artists; Clifford is kind, but Enid is a drunk with a vicious tongue. Lucie hardly has time to take in her mouldering surroundings before she is sent to a girls’ boarding school. She writes to her mother, begging her to come and fetch her, but Ruth is not given the letters until she and her husband (not Lucie’s father) are sailing back to Malaya.
We hear the inner thoughts of Ruth (driven to despair by an unhappy marriage and constant miscarriages) and Lucie (abandoned, a misfit, yearning for a mother who only sends occasional postcards). As the years go by, we hear from others who enter their lives.
This is a story of Lucie’s self-discovery. As she lives through the forties and fifties, she begins to question the traditional role of women. In Ceylon, trapped in a loveless, barren marriage and stifled by the conventions of expat life, will she at last find the courage to break free and follow her own dreams?
The characters are well fleshed out, and the rotting house and grounds in Devon, the ghastly boarding school, and the tropical sights and sounds of Malaya and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) are all brought into sharp focus by some wonderfully descriptive writing.
