Fran Cooper

When I discovered a copy of Fran Cooper’s new novel the other week, I couldn’t believe my luck. You might remember that I thoroughly enjoyed her debut, These Dividing Walls, a compassionate story of tensions within the walls of a Parisian apartment block. Her new novel is of a different stripe: a tale of Londoners Jay and Simon, whose dream holiday home in Yorkshire turns out to have unexpected baggage. The aptly-named Two Houses used to be one building, but its central rooms were cut out, levelled to the ground after the tragic death of its former owner’s wife, and rumoured to have housed a ghostly presence. From the moment she arrives, Jay feels a strange rapport with the unloved building, but she and Simon will discover that the villagers take a grim view of the new arrivals, and that Two Houses has yet to give up all its dark secrets…

For the full review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2018/06/06/the-two-houses-fran-cooper/… (mer)

In a rundown, unfashionable part of Paris, far removed from the romance and grandeur of the City of Love a young Englishman arrives looking for a safe-haven following a family tragedy. As he tries to deal with his own inner confusion he becomes embroiled in the lives of his many neighbours and their worries, their dislikes, their uncertainties represent a sense of wider change and growing agitation in Paris as a whole.

There is so much to enjoy in These Dividing Walls. She writes with impressive assurance and clarity for a debut novel, with perfect narrative control and poise. Her characters are excellently realised, forming a diverse cast of peoples whose lives intersect and collide in their shared building, it's a dynamic that you will probably be familiar with if you have ever lived in a block of flats. These are convincingly ordinary people, living recognisable, largely unremarkable lives but Cooper writes them with real charm and sympathy, and a finely-judged dash of eccentricity so that you come to care for each of them in spite of their flaws and pettiness. They're amusing infuriating, heart-breaking and most importantly they are believable, because this is not just a charming, light-hearted tale about neighbourhood relations, it's also a book of clever contrasts that sheds thoughtful light on the sides of Paris more at home in the headlines than the picture postcards.

"Oh, Edward," one character sighs towards the end, "the myths we make for ourselves," and this theme defines many of the contrasts that Cooper contracts between the real and the imaginary, the simplified ideal and the complex reality. There's subtlety and insight in the way that the grandeur of the Louvre and Monmatre with homelessness, unemployment and the struggle to make ends meet in the dilapidated streets where Edward settles. These daily struggles weigh on her characters and the new Muslim family moving into the building become easy targets for hostility and frustration. These issues are sensitively unpicked as fear and tension rise with a new terror attack at Notre Dame and the violent response of the Far Right. She convincingly demonstrates the all-too-easy drift into extremism for those looking for someone to blame and it rings very true both for those characters who watch on from the periphery in horror or vindication and for those swept up more directly in the flow of hatred. My only reservation with this aspect of the story is that there is so little of the Labiris (the new Muslim residents) whose perspective could have contributed so much.

The way that innocuous personal narratives are woven with violence and terrorism is remarkably true to the way these things really touch most people, shockingly but often peripherally and life goes on in spite of them. Edward struggles with his personal grief and forges new relationships far from home while his neighbours struggle with failing marriages, unorthodox relationships, loneliness and mental illness. And yet despite it all this is not a dark book. It's full of characters I became fond of and is often astute and touching in equal measure. It offers a lot of hope without denying that there is darkness in people. A warm and ultimately uplifting story… (mer)