When the past refuses to disappear

Homecoming

Kate Morton, Mantle

***** (5 stars)

Homecoming is a vast, slow burn of a novel that is family saga and multilayered mystery. It opens with a horrific crime in the summer of 1959 and proceeds to map out its lingering shadow across generations. It is also a complex tale of secrets and lies, family and relationships, betrayal and deception.

Few novelists write about family or the way the past leaks into the present as tellingly or as satisfyingly as Morton. Each of her six previous novels — runaway international best-sellers that have sold in excess of 16-million copies — attests to this.

As the Australian-born Morton is quick to tell me: “It’s the touching of the present and the past that interests me.”

Sometimes called the Queen of Gothic for her penchant for deploying many of the tropes in her books, Morton admits she still struggles to define the genre of her novels. She also, albeit gently, takes issue with the historical fiction tag with which some label her books in general and Homecoming in particular.

“I don’t even find that apt, though there is usually a historical storyline. It’s not about the historical storyline as a separate entity, it is about layers of time and the way the past refuses to disappear. It is omnipresent, whether through memories or family secrets, even just family relationships or through houses that have been lived in across time.”

Homecoming was seeded by the experience of her own homecoming to South Australia’s Adelaide Hills at the onset of the pandemic. She had been living in London with her family and writing a novel set in Europe when the it started, recounts Morton.

“Then my kids were sent home from school and classes went online, so we came back to Australia in the most surreal, discombobulating long-haul flight of my life, landing just as borders were shutting and flights were cancelled. And because the rest of the world was in such a state of turmoil and chaos and unknowability, the immediate landscape in which we’d suddenly found ourselves seemed brighter. I started to see a landscape I knew very well with fresh eyes; with almost an outsider’s eye.”

Gripped by a compulsion to write about that landscape and the nature of belonging, Morton abandoned her manuscript in progress and opened herself to the ideas the landscape around her presented. So potently did it yield ideas and “visceral sensations”, the Adelaide Hills setting is like another character in Homecoming, where the murder scene of the wealthy Turner family on Christmas Eve 1959, in the grounds of their grand house, is vividly described by a witness in its prologue.

Sixty years later, Jess, a struggling freelance journalist based in London, rushes home to Sydney when her grandmother, Nora, who raised her, is hospitalised after a bad fall. Pledging to write an article about her homecoming for a London editor, Jess instead becomes obsessed with the contents of the book she discovers in her grandmother’s bedroom. Written by an American journalist, it chronicles the police investigation of the infamous 1959 murder and reveals a shocking connection between her family and this long-unsolved crime.

So it is that Morton sets in motion the twin storylines of this intricately plotted, richly detailed and cannily layered novel. Narrated in nine parts and from different character perspectives, Homecoming slowly brings the storylines together in ways as shocking and revelatory as they are satisfying.

Morton says it has a more sinister edge than her previous novels, in the nature of the 1959 murders and “the idea that within an apparently loving family situation there can still be lies perpetuated. That was of great interest to me when I started; the way we are all the sum of our back stories and so often what those back stories are depends upon who tells them. So there’s that personal layer of family stories, but on a different level I also explored the idea further with the book within the book. That opened up a whole other arena for me in which to explore this idea about storytellers and truth and what is truth? Which is, of course, with journalism — and Jess is a journalist — one of the great issues of our time.”

For Morton, a believer that we are all the sum of the stories we’re told and we tell ourselves, it is, she says, “one of those eternal themes, and it reappears in each of my books”.

Other recurring elements — like layers of family secrets, old houses, the past impacting the present — entered her fiction as her response to rejection.

“I’d been rejected a couple of times, so when I started writing my third manuscript, I thought: 'Well, I’ll never be a published author so just put the things in that you love,’ and I wrote a list — I still have it — titled ‘Things I’d Like To See In A Novel'.”

To her astonishment, that manuscript, The Shifting Fog, later renamed The House at Riverton, became the most successful debut novel in UK history and went on to sell millions of copies worldwide.

The success of her subsequent novels continues to exceed her wildest expectations, but Morton has had to learn that “necessary lesson of disconnecting from all expectations”, just as she did initially, and “of remaining true to what I want to read about, what I want to write about, and finding that authenticity within my own manuscript”.

But the magnetic lure of her fiction, with her undeniable skills as a storyteller, stems from Morton’s childhood fascination with storytelling and all it tools.

“Before I even went to school I knew that disappearing into a book was going to another place and that feeling has been with me forever.”

She is also quick to credit — as she does in all her books — her former speech and drama teachers and friends, Herbert and Rita Davies, since deceased.

“For a child growing up in a small town in Australia, they opened so many windows to the world though a love of language and storytelling and I miss them terribly and feel so grateful.”

Morton has often said she is still chasing that feeling of immersion, of disappearing into the world of a book, and says she started writing to capture that childhood joy of reading.

“That’s one of those things that drove me to write. It's a guiding principle. If I’m not feeling that when I’m writing, the reader won't either. When people say that they disappeared inside the world of the story, it resonates because that’s the way I felt as a child, and it’s what I hope for.”

She adds: “So when people express that to me, I feel very, very glad.”

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Kate Morton on the books that have influenced her

The Brambly Hedge books by Jill Barklem

As a child, I adored Barklem’s series about a community of mice living in the roots and branches of a hedgerow in England. So much of the landscape of imagination is formed when we are young, and I pored over Barklem’s spellbinding illustrations, noticing tiny details and delighting in the rich world she created.

The books value and celebrate nature, but also honour the house as a place of warmth, safety and retreat. They showed me that the book itself can be a home of sorts, too: a whole other place into which one can disappear and live for a time.

Rhapsody on a Windy Night by TS Eliot

I was introduced to Eliot’s poetry when I was about 20 by my great friend and mentor Herbert Davies, who had been a radio drama producer for the BBC, but whom I knew in his later years as a second-hand bookseller and a teacher at a theatre school.

I was drawn to Rhapsody on a Windy Night immediately for its language and imagery, but also because Eliot’s fascination with layers of time focused my own. The interweaving of the present and the past is one of the most consistent themes within my books and fundamental to the way I see and understand the world.

The Enchanted Wood: The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton

This was the first non-picture book I can remember owning and the one that made me a reader.

I read it from front to back, and then turned it over and started again. My family lived, at the time, in a wooden stilt house with a backyard adjoining thick rainforest, so it did not seem beyond the realm of possibility that I might discover my own Faraway Tree, full of fairy folk, if I searched hard enough.

That childhood experience of immersion within the world of the book is something I still chase as a reader and strive to create as a writer.

A Dark-Adapted Eye by Barbara Vine

When I was at university, by chance I picked up a copy. I was already partial to mystery and crime novels but this was the first I’d read in which the murderer’s identity was known from the start and the story’s central question “why” rather than “who”. 

Through its focus on character and the complicated — often secret — nature of family relationships, I perceived how expansive (and intimate) the mystery genre could be and saw that writers need not be bound by a prescriptive approach.

Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways

This brings together many of the elements that engage me in my life and work: it layers observations about nature with ideas about stories and imagination, beauty and mystery, while exploring what it means to be human within an ancient landscape.

I have a deep conviction that sense of place is fundamental to our sense of self, and The Old Ways reminds me that the natural world can be every bit as important as the house it holds when writing about home and belonging.