The Sea House

Newsnight Review discussed Esther Freud's novel The Sea House.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

KWAME KWEI-ARMAH:
I liked the way the narrative unfolded. Sometimes she would mention an inconsequential word and in a couple of chapters' time it became really deep in meaning and told me something deep about the character. I really liked it. It gave me the feeling that I was a man of letters. I was able to go back and look at a time when people wrote to each other. Much like now with e-mail, but when people wrote to each other and spoke of their feelings. I discovered things about characters maybe 30 pages in that a lesser writer would maybe have described in the first page. I really enjoyed it. I thought it was very lovely.

MARK LAWSON:
She has got the double time scheme and the two places, Suffolk and Germany. If you are going to do that, the challenge is to alter the prose in each of them. Does she bring that off?

PROFESSOR JOHN CAREY:
No, I don't think so. I admire a lot of things about the novel. Kwame says very gradually the stuff is unravelled, but it seems to me it's like a living body with an artificial limb. The Lehmann stuff seems to be dead and wooden, the letters are wooden. In contrast, the affair that Lily has one mustn't give away the plot - and the children are beautifully done - warm and human and intimate. It's very strange that she bothered to put in the architect part, except maybe she thought the novel wasn't big enough without that sort of looking back at the persecution of the Jews, which comes in with the mid 20th century plot, and the character called Max, who is a very, very fine character, remembering Germany back in the Nazi time.

MARK LAWSON:
I don't say this facetiously, but isn't it Freudian, in two senses, because she has based it on her great grandfather. It's being haunted by the past.

PROFESSOR JOHN CAREY:
Indeed. There is the symbol which is Freudian, because it's between the conscious and sunshine conscious passion.

BONNIE GREER:
This to me had its own peculiar music. It took a long time for that music to start. I thought it didn't start early enough. It took a long time to start - not uncommon, unfortunately, these days. Once it did start, it lived for certain moments. The way she described a bird flying. How blind you are when you walk in out of the sun. I am also interested in the British-Jewish community. I think she evoked that in a really moving way. I do agree with John that she couldn't hold together those two strands, and it was a bit ambitious, although I don't think you should knock a writer for trying to be ambitious. A big story that she's trying to write holds together if you give it its time. It needs that really.

MARK LAWSON:
I thought it did have a hypnotic quality. An important book for her. She had huge success with Hideous Kinky, and she had an amazing story in the family locker. But now she is trying to get away from the autobiographical.

PROFESSOR JOHN CAREY:
She has the sense of place. The huge seascapes, that's all very well done.

MARK LAWSON:
Again, you read things into her childhood, but this sense of the isolation of Lily, the contemporary woman, waiting, desperate for this man to arrive, which there is in a lot of her books, I thought was very powerful.

KWAME KWEI-ARMAH:
I thought that was lovely. I liked the way she commented on the kind of coldness of modern life and the need for the mobile phone, and the need for instant communication. I liked the fact there were some sympathetic German characters in a time like we are living right now. I enjoyed that.

BONNIE GREER:
I would say she is essentially a miniaturist. If she can trust herself to allow those small pictures she creates. When she makes a statement about Hitler addressing concentration camp victims in pyjamas - I thought, "No, don't go there."

MARK LAWSON:
I thought that was a powerful line.

PROFESSOR JOHN CAREY:
It had a wonderful love scene between Elsa and Max. One of the most beautiful love scenes I have read for a long time, and moving.