Bad Relations by Cressida Connolly

Viking, £14.99, 288 pages

Families don’t always bring out the best in people,” says one of the characters towards the end of Cressida Connolly’s novel Bad Relations. Despite its title, this gem is about much more than familial discord through the generations; its themes are memory, loss, grief and redemption. It begins in the Crimean War, with officer William Gale. His valour earns him a Victoria Cross, though he is wounded invisibly with PTSD having lost many of his friends and his younger brother in the field. 

His young wife Alice learns that she must accept an altered version of her husband, whose explosive outbursts are matched only by his emotional withdrawal. But not even she is prepared for his less-than-gallant behaviour when, having impregnated his mistress (Sarah Lockwood, the scheming widow of his deceased best friend), he wrongly accuses his wife of infidelity with the family doctor. To escape the stigma of divorce in late-Victorian society, Alice leaves England for a new life in Australia. 

In the 1970s, William Gale’s English descendants – an outwardly glamorous and bohemian family – invite their Australian cousin, Stephen, to stay in their large, dilapidated house in Cornwall. Stephen is enchanted by the family, though all is not as it seems. A glorious summer of love soon turns to tragedy, with repercussions that leave invisible wounds upon the following generations every bit as traumatic as the Crimean war on William Gale. 

The English novel has long thrived on charming but damaged people who live in big houses. Connolly’s spin on the motif, effortlessly moving from the Victorian era to the present day, via the drugged-up 1970s, shows her to be at the height of her literary powers. Of particular merit is her depiction of the crumbling of William and Alice’s happy marriage, because of the cruel intervention of Sarah Lockwood. 

Alice senses Sarah is a rival, but she has little conception of the limitless possibilities of her cruelty. Sarah spreads the lie of Alice’s supposed transgression, steals her traumatised husband from under her nose and cares little for the consequences for Alice and her baby boy. Sarah’s cold and exploitative manipulation of William and Alice is reflected in her descendant, Celia Clarke, whose chilling behaviour is the cause of a new family tragedy. 

Family characteristics pass down the ages, not just in the red hair of William’s dead brother, inherited by Australian Stephen, but in the places that can’t always be seen: the heart and the mind. But the novel’s plot (the case of the missing Victoria Cross) hangs on a question mark. The case is left open. Family memory is treacherous, and siblings and parents have their own secrets and lies, their own tensions, their own rivalries. In Connolly’s experienced hands, everyone’s a victim of bad relations, and redemption comes from the most unlikely of places. 

Her prose is exquisite: Alice, pregnant, feels the baby’s kick as “a sensation like a butterfly beneath her ribs,” while Queen Victoria pins the medal on William with hands “as pale as unripe fruit”. Stephen, who has inherited William’s handsome face, is ripe for painting, or sculpture: “His profile was especially fine, with a nose that was a fraction too big, like an old portrait of a Doge.”

Stephen, all gangly long limbs and highly-sexed animal energy, is drawn to beauty. He falls in love with his lovely cousin, Cass, but he is caught unaware by the sudden sharp beauty of her sister, Georgie, naked on the river bank, in a patch of sunlight, which renders her like a statue, “outside of time”. But the moment has its darkness: “It made something in him constrict and ping, like a rubber band snapped against a wrist.” 

The unravelling of Stephen’s own secret (perhaps an allusion to hereditary illness) and its inexorable climax is sensitively handled, bringing us back full circle to his ancestors lost and damaged in the Crimean War. As Connolly’s novel reminds us, it’s not just the men fighting the wars or carrying dark secrets who are battle-scarred and damaged, but the women left behind and tasked with the job of remembering. 

Paula Byrne is writing a new biography of Thomas Hardy

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