Instructions for a Heatwave (2014)

Why this one?

I recently read and very much enjoyed Hamnet (as part of my Women’s Prize winners read-through) and The Marriage Portrait (via the 2023 Women’s Prize shortlist) and decided I should check out some of O’Farrell’s earlier work.

Maggie O'Farrell (1972- ; active 2000- ) was born in Coleraine in County Derry/Londonderry in Northern Ireland, but grew up in Wales and Scotland. She studied English Literature at the University of Cambridge, before working as a journalist, including a stint as deputy literary editor of The Independent. She lives in Edinburgh with her husband, the English novelist William Sutcliffe, with whom she has three children.

Her novels to date have been widely acclaimed and awarded, from her first novel After You'd Gone (2000) which took the Betty Trask Award for young debut novelists, through the Costa-winning The Hand That First Held Mine (2010), Instructions for a Heatwave (2014), which was shortlisted for the Costa, and Hamnet which won the National Book Critics Circle award in addition to the aforementioned 2020 Women's Prize. Her most recent novel was 2022’s The Marriage Portrait, which saw her shortlisted again for the 2023 Women’s Prize. She has also written two children's books, published a memoir (I Am, I Am, I Am) in 2017, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2021.

Thoughts, etc.

Instructions for a Heatwave is set during the UK’s record-breaking 1976 heatwave and drought. It focuses on an Irish family, led by Gretta and Robert Riordan, who moved to London and raised three children, who have all now left home.. Robert goes out one morning for a newspaper and mysteriously disappears, which is the impetus for a re-grouping of the remaining family members, all of whom are dealing with their own issues and harbouring secrets.

Michael Francis, the son, is married with two young children, though evidently not entirely happily. There has been an affair, and his wife has taken on a new circle of friends from her Open University degree who colonise their living room for frequent ‘discussion groups’. Monica, the eldest daughter, is in her own unhappy marriage - in her case a second, following a seemingly traumatic divorce - now living in the countryside with Peter and his two daughters, who apparently hate her - all the more so when she oversees the putting down of their beloved cat. Aoife, the youngest, has decamped to New York where she has a slightly more promising relationship and career, but both are threatened by her unwillingness to share a secret of her own.

O’Farrell concludes the novel with an explanation of its genesis - she kept obsessively coming back to the image of an estranged family arguing in their childhood home. Eventually, she landed on the setting of the 1976 heatwave as a suitably oppressive environment in which to set her still-plotless book, and built from there. In plot terms, it carries the sense of having been constructed from these relatively fragile threads. Unlikely the firmly situated and elaborately constructed worlds of her two most recent novels, it’s a book where its setting never quite moves beyond being a convenient staging point for family drama. It’s certainly present in the first pages of the novel, with evocative moments of bug invasions and illegal baths setting the scene nicely, but it then seems to recede as more compelling matters take over. The central mystery of Robert’s disappearance also seems for the most part to be something of a red herring, merely set up get him out of the way to leave room for the buried history and conflict between the remaining reunited family members to fester and breed.

Putting all of that aside, the family drama that does emerge from this slightly stage-y setup is hugely compelling. The characters are all brilliantly drawn, with each of them outwardly unlikeable but hiding secrets and inner lives that make them ultimately sympathetic. Gretta is initially a comic character, first heard on the telephone to her children, rambling about the location of a shed key rather than getting to the point that their father has disappeared, in an hilarious and brilliant cut-through to the opening’s otherwise stifling atmosphere. Thereafter she’s a cliche of an Irish matriarch in London in her era, killing her children with kindness just as she chastises them for minor incidences of blasphemy. The eventual cracking of her tough and busymaking facade as she’s forced to come to terms with her own past is tragic and moving, though, as is a tour-de-force page of reflection on her empty-nester house and its haunting by the young lives of her now departed children.

The children’s stories are all also very well-told, with slow reveals of the human mistakes, regrets, and tragedies that sit beneath their ostensibly harsh exteriors. All of their stories, perhaps like the one that sits between them all and their mother, come down to failures of communication. In Aoife’s story, we see that rendered very (deliberately) literally, and its resolution when she opens up to her boyfriend brings a very satisfactory resolution to her thread. Monica and Aoife’s three-year estrangement is down to a classic tale of assumptions made and never spoken. Michael Francis has made one significant mistake, but his greater error is to assume that everything that his wife Claire subsequently does is in the cause of revenge. We get resolutions of sorts for most of these threads. Robert and Gretta’s lack of communication belongs to another era though, in which it can never be spoken between them, only atoned for in a religious sense. It’s perhaps fitting, then, that Robert is largely absent from the book, and doesn’t return for a grand unravelling at its conclusion.

Score

8

A beautifully-written and page-turning novel, which I’m glad I picked up. It’s in some ways worlds away from the carefully constructed historical fiction of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait, but in it you can certainly see the seeds of that brilliant knack for explaining the weirdness that exists within families.

Next up

Back to some Netgalley books I think, and awaiting the Booker longlist reveal…