20 Books of Summer, #5: Private Rites

Any horror story could be said to work in two pieces: the fear of being wholly alone and of realising that one has company.

Julia Armfield’s debut novel, Our Wives Under The Sea, was one of my top ten books of 2022, so it’s not surprising that I found her second, Private Rites, a bit disappointing in comparison. Private Rites follows three queer sisters, Isla, Irene and Agnes, as they face the slow dissolving of their world in the face of climate chaos. Rain is almost constant and floods are increasingly common, but like the Canadians in Fort McMurray who dropped off their dry-cleaning as a catastrophic wildfire was approaching, the sisters continue living their everyday lives, working at coffee shops, offering therapy sessions and negotiating romantic relationships. The event that ruptures their world is not a tsunami nor a maelstrom but the death of their distant architect father and their revisiting of the house he designed himself, which is ‘both transparent and impenetrable’. ‘It was built to rise above water… strung with ribbon windows that run to fifty feet on either side, it streams from north to south as a single linear form… Its legs are mechanical, extending as necessary to match the rising water levels… Easy to watch the water lap against the bottom of the windows and miss the fact that the house is rising higher to account for this encroachment’. Honestly, it sounds a bit like Halley VI.

The house the sisters inherit is a tremendous metaphor for the world they live in, and Armfield’s writing is as brilliant as ever. She is so good at writing both emotion and description, at making us feel many different kinds of rain. For me, though, Private Rites felt too diffuse. It obviously lacks the taut plot-thread that led us through Our Wives, but that in itself wouldn’t have been a problem for me; I think writing a great plot is much harder than we’re led to believe, but I’ve also enjoyed many a plotless book. What I struggled with was the way we dance between the sisters’ points of view and even once, into the heads of two of their partners. Irene was the only sister who really comes into full focus, as Isla and Agnes fail to move beyond the stock roles they are forced to play (Isla->older sister->emotionally closed->needs to be in control; Agnes->younger sister->free spirit->scared of commitment->frustrates her older sisters with her scattiness). And even Irene felt hard to grasp hold of because we are constantly being whisked away from her as soon as we connect with her. I would have loved Armfield to have trapped the sisters in the house, together, earlier on in the book. Although Private Rites is a much better novel, the scattering of its cast reminded me a little of Coco Mellor’s Blue Sisters, which only really worked for me when all the living sisters were in the same room.

Private Rites has been framed as more ambitious than Our Wives Under The Sea, even if it’s not totally successful, but while I’d agree that this is an ambitious novel, I think that assessment underplays just how good Our Wives is. As I wrote at the time, it’s so, so difficult to achieve that kind of crossover between literary and speculative fiction, and to write an ending as powerful as the ending of Our Wives, which brings both strands together. It looks simple because it tells an old story about strange monsters under the sea, but its straightforwardness hides its accomplishment. Private Rites, in contrast, is not a horror novel, and not meant to be. It aims for the same kind of emotional-speculative intertwining in its climax, but it felt too sudden, and fell short. Having said that, though, I’m still a huge Armfield fan. This book was worth reading for the line I quoted at the start of this review alone, but it’s also, despite its unevenness, the best account of everyday apocalypse I’ve ever encountered.

I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.