The Witch of Exmoor
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year: “Part social satire, part thriller, and entirely clever” (Elle).
It is a midsummer’s evening in the English countryside, and the three grown Palmer children are coming to the end of an enjoyable meal in the company of their partners and offspring. From this pleasant vantage point they play a dinner-party game: What kind of society would you be willing to accept if you didn’t know your place in it? But the abstract question of justice, like all their family conversations, is eventually brought back to the more pressing problem of their eccentric mother, Frieda, the famous writer, who has abandoned them and her old life, and gone to live alone in Exmoor.
Frieda has always been a powerful and puzzling figure, a monster mother with a mysterious past. What is she plotting against them now? Has some inconvenient form of political correctness led her to favor her enchanting half-Guyanese grandson? What will she do with her money? Is she really writing her memoirs? And why has she disappeared? Has the dark spirit of Exmoor finally driven her mad?
The Witch of Exmoor brilliantly interweaves high comedy and personal tragedy, unraveling the story of a family whose comfortable, rational lives, both public and private, are about to be violently disrupted by a succession of sinister, messy events. “Leisurely and mischievous,” it is a dazzling, wickedly gothic tale of a British matriarch, her three grasping children, and the perils of self-absorption (The New Yorker).
“As meticulous as Jane Austen, as deadly as Evelyn Waugh.” —Los Angeles Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Frieda Haxby Palmer, writer, intellectual, and the witch of the title of this bristling social satire, is a splendid, classic British eccentric, a woman who is capable of serving her family a dish of proletarian "Bumperburgers," which contains no meat, just "gristle, fat, chicken scraps, and water from cow's heads." She does this to prove a favorite point to her smug, opinionated children (surgeon, lawyer, arts administrator), who are blundering through lives as apparently conventional as hers has been unusual. The point is that their slick, prosperous world is in fact moribund, so corrupt and monstrous that it is rotting on its feet. Not content with dinner-table dissent, Frieda sues Her Majesty's Government over her tax returns, shuns her children's company, abandons her expensive car in a traffic jam and moves into an isolated, near-derelict Victorian Gothic hotel on England's western coast. Drabble depicts the objects of Frieda's scorn in terms that are at once ingenious and disturbing. Animals are filthy, slaughter-house fodder, food has become diseased, living environments are toxic. Characters are haunted by their past, confused by their origins; Frieda's favorite grandson is deeply anguished over his mixed Indian-Guyanese heritage, her eldest son's child is a junkie. But such grimness never overwhelms Drabble's sly humor and urbane wit or her mischievous eye for revealing detail. When Frieda disappears without warning, the drama turns to mystery, and her children, as concerned about her will as about her fate, are left to unravel the puzzle of their mother's existence and their own. Swimming in the murk of post-Thatcher Britain and taking a stern but knowing view of the English bourgeoisie, this is postmodern family drama at its best.