'Guilt is a feeble emotion. It surrenders too easily'~ The View From Here
In the mid 1970s, aged 22, Frances is drifting through Mexico when she meets, and is invited to stay with a glamorous group of wealthy Americans in their mansion on a private beach. She is soon drawn into their hedonistic lifestyle and an affair with her married host.
Two decades later, prompted by the sudden unraveling of her contented existence in rural England, she records the events of this period of her life, and the tragedy that marked its ending.
Excerpt
I was a blonde eating an avocado, in a country where avocados were plentiful and blondes were rare, on a hot night over half my lifetime ago...
Frances is dying. She knows it, her daughter knows it, her husband knows it, and her husband’s mistress knows it. Frances is fairly peaceful with the prospect, though she aches for her daughter, Chloe, and all the time together they’ll miss.
The certainty of death is part of what drives Frances to reflect and record the part she played in another family’s tragedy a lifetime ago in Mexico, where she was known as Frankie. Back then she was the beach-house guest of a wealthy family, the patriarch of which took a liking to her, a liking Frankie mistook for love. She learned the hard way that she was simply a part of his habit, and the morbid consequences of her emotional reaction haunt her older self as she nears the end of her life.
Frances makes for a good narrator; she is honest, devoted, and able to weigh the future of her loved ones against her own sense of rage at her husband’s infidelity. As a young woman she is infinitely recognizable. Most readers are familiar with that particular brand of innocence, the kind that maintains a willful blindness to both the devastating effects of one’s actions and to the disappointing possibility that one may make no mark at all amongst people more powerful.
Deborah McKinlay, English author of several nonfiction books, keeps the past and present acutely balanced with a deft, precise narrative that makes readers both eager to know the end and unwilling to speed through such succulent prose. Her use of character is brilliant. The wealthy family and their fashionable friends manage to retain their defining details—BeeBee’s wry, dry wit and Richard’s stiff attempts at joviality—while blending into one another in a sweeping portrayal of privilege. Readers will like both the youthful and more mature Frances, and will likely admire her strength, endurance, and dignity. One might find oneself wishing for a miracle cure even while one laps up McKinlay’s descriptions of the end of a marriage and the end of a life. When Frances reveals her crime, it’s impossible to react with a sense of extreme judgment.
A book of sweet, studied passion, The View From Here is both an escape into an ocean-side tale of splendid fun and a deep dive into the moral questions that can define lives and deaths.
Andi Diehn
Kirkus Review (contains spoilers!)
Kirkus Star Editor Review (reviewed on December 1, 2010)
In British writer McKinlay's fiction debut, a carefully modulated morality play, a middle-aged woman who knows she is dying struggles with a basic dilemma—"whether a good deed cancels a bad one, whether evil is undone by penance." Married for over 20 years, Frances and Phillip live in rural England, where Frances has devoted herself to raising Phillip's now-25-year-old daughter Chloe, whose birth mother abandoned her, as her own.
At 45, Frances is diagnosed with a fatal tumor, and Phillip drops his life in London to stay at home and care for her. But Frances has recently discovered a letter that links him romantically with a younger woman named Josee, the London-based editor of his books on marketing. Without confronting Phillip, Frances follows him into the city and witnesses what is obviously a farewell meeting. Over the next months, as she watches Phillip's behavior, she reflects back on her own behavior as a footloose 22-year-old in Mexico and feels compelled to record in writing her involvement with a group of wealthy Americans whose selfish hedonism bring to mind The Great Gatsby : The three couples—Patsy and Richard, Bee Bee and Ned, Sally and Mason—seem interchangeable when they first meet Frances at a bar and invite her to come stay with them at the lavish estate where they are spending the summer. But soon Frankie, as they call her, begins a passionate affair with Mason. She considers Sally the villain and chooses to ignore that Mason and Patsy are also lovers, until it is too late. Guilt over her own culpability in the affair, and in its aftermath, pervades Frances' last days, during which she recognizes Phillip's loyalty and love along with his betrayal. As the novel glides fluently between Frances' reactions as an obsessively thoughtful dying married woman and Frankie's as a callow girl whose selfish desire for Mason trumped all other reactions, an uneasy sense of ethical murkiness grows.
A riveting novel in which the deceptively clear narrative voice offers no easy answers.
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