Miranda’s parents live in a dilapidated house in rural France that they share with two llamas, eight ducks, five chickens, two cats, and a freezer full of food dating back to 1983.
Miranda’s father is a retired professor of philosophy who never loses an argument. Her mother likes to bring conversation back to the War, although she was born after it ended. Married for fifty years, they are uncommonly set in their ways.
Miranda plays the role of translator when she visits, communicating the desires or complaints of one parent to the other and then venting her frustration to her sister and her daughter.
At the end of a visit, she reports ‘the usual desire to kill’.
‘The Usual DesireTo Kill’ was one of the best books I’ve read so far this year. I’m recommending it to anyone who will listen.
Despite what the title might suggest, this isn’t a thriller. It’s a beautifully crafted mainstream novel that takes an honest and empathetic look at the relationship between a couple in their seventies who have been married for more than fifty years and the difficulties their adult children have in comprehending and having grown-up conversations with their parents.
Camilla Barnes delivered startlingly accurate dialogue and did interesting things with form that enhanced rather than distracted me from the story.
Like life itself, this book is funny in parts, sad in parts and much more complicated than it first appears to be.
The humour launches the book. The sadness is a shadow the book slides slowly into.
The book starts as letters from the younger daughter to the older daughter, in which she shares stories of the strange but unsurprising activities of their parents, activities which, by the end of a weekend, leave her with ‘the usual desire to kill‘. Much of the humour comes from the daughter’s I’d-like-to-be-incredulous-but-we’ve-both-seen-this-too-often-to-be-surprised tone and from the honestly-they-said-this-out-loud snipets of conversation that she shares.
The tone of the story shifts when we roll back in time and get letters from the mother to her sister, describing her arrival for her first term at Oxford. The difference between the world view of the young woman writing about her hopes and disappointments and the old woman verbally fighint her corner and imposing her will on her family immediately raises the question: “Whatever happened to her?”
As the story progressed with letters between the two daughters, punctuated by letters between the mother and her sister, my perception of all of the characters shifted. I was reminded that nobody is just who they are today. We are all also still who we once were and who we had hoped to become.
The sadness comes not just from the events that turned the hopeful young woman into an embattled old woman but from seeing how little the daughters understand their parents’ history and how blind the parents are to the impact they’ve had on the children they’ve raised.
What I liked most about the book is that there are no good guys or bad guys in it, just people, flawed and sometimes flailing, trying to live with the choices they’ve made. All of the people feel real. The purpose of the book is to understand them, not judge them.
Harriet Walters’ narration was the icing on the cake. Click on the YouTube link to hear a sample.
Camilla Barnes was born and brought up in England but moved to France when she was twenty.
Since then she has worked in many areas of the theatre in Paris ; costume and set design, stage direction and production and more recently writing and photography.
The hours spent sitting in the wings have taught her to listen to dialogue and audience reactions.
The years spent as a mother and daughter have taught her to listen to family conversations and to laugh at them when possible.
She is bilingual and writes in both English and French.
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