The Last of Summer – Kate O’Brien (1943)

The Last of Summer was Kate O’Brien’s sixth novel, written during the Second World War it concerns those last few weeks of the summer that lead to the break out of hostilities between Great Britain and Germany. It is clearly a novel written by an author in full control of their craft, setting and characterisation are quite perfect, tense, and claustrophobic atmospheres spine tingling in their realness. There is not a huge amount of plot in this novel – and there doesn’t need to be – there is so much to enjoy for its own sake. To read this novel is like taking a slow, meandering walk on a late summer evening through the twisting lanes of a new and unexplored place.

The novel opens as our heroine Angèle Maury arrives at the station of Drumaninch, she asks directions of the porter there – before setting off to walk to the home of her aunt by marriage that she has never met.

Angèle, a young French actress, had been travelling in Ireland with friends when she decide to cut them loose and go instead to the family home of her dead father. Maury is a stage name – her name by rights is Kernahan like that of the people at Waterpark house. Waterpark house is the big house of the district – one in which many of the locals take something of an interest. Angèle arrives unexpected and unlooked for and for one person at least, unwelcome – most of the family at Waterpark house unaware even of her existence.

“…there were people, female shapes, in the semi-circular embrasure of an enormous, outflung window. The girl advanced towards two blurred heads, half-closing her eyes. The northerly aspect of the entrance façade, with its sober ilex trees, had seemed almost cold, had indeed suggested a somewhat menacing detachment from the bright day; the hall and the maidservant’s voice had been cool and almost friendly, and unsteadied her.

‘What’s that you’re raving about Delia? The children’s cousin – from France, did I hear you say?’ The voice was chuckly and uneducated. A civilised and soft one answered it lightly.

‘You did Dotey. You heard her say it.’

The latter speaker extended a pretty hand, with a silver thimble on the middle finger, towards Angèle.

‘This is unexpected’ she said amiably.”

Angèle’s father was Tom Kernahan – one of three brothers. Waterpark house is now ruled over by Hannah Kernahan the widow of Ned, Tom’s brother. Now she is assisted by her eldest son, also called Tom. Tom is very much the golden child of the family, the heir and the eldest son, the expectations of the family and the locals lay heavy on his shoulders. Also living at Waterpark house are Tom’s two younger siblings; charming Martin and Jo, who likes to gamble but has pretty much decided to enter into the religious life, their mother’s impoverished cousin Dotey and the lovably ridiculous Uncle Corney – the last of those three brothers.

It transpires that Hannah was the only member of the household who knew of Angèle’s existence but had never seen fit to share her knowledge with the rest of the family. Angèle’s father had left the family home more than twenty-five years earlier – gone to France and married a French actress, and it seems thought no more of by his family in Ireland. Now his daughter is alone – her mother also dead – and she arrives at Waterpark house wishing to make some kind of sense of the past. Hannah is very much the matriarch here – her world is one of certainty and order – we see her often through the eyes of others, variously, a saint, a martyr, and a steely eyed arranger of how things should be. Into this world comes the young, pale exotic French beauty that is Angèle Maury daughter of an exiled father and her actress mother – she can’t help but disrupt this closed, ordered little world immediately. The reader senses early on a certain kind of fire in Hannah – a woman capable of fighting to keep her world the way she sees it.

Angèle is swept up immediately by her cousins, especially Martin and Jo, who want to know all about her and have her stay the whole summer. Tom initially stands at something of a distance, yet he too is clearly very affected by her arrival. Uncle Corney is charmed beyond reason by Angèle, and Dotey takes all her direction from Hannah – who is altogether harder to read. In the coming days Angèle is introduced to some of the locals, who take a great interest in her presence – and speculate about her and Tom from the beginning. There is plenty of time to get to know her new family on long summer days at Waterpark house and on a day out to Carahone – with its amusements, merry-go-rounds, aunt sallies and brass bands. Within days Martin has fallen in love with Angèle, and Angèle and Tom with one another.

“Tom turned from the window swiftly when he heard the tone of her voice.

‘I’ve been asleep a long time, I think,’ he said, and he spoke fast now and his voice shook. ‘In a way, I’ve never been awake. But since you came, since I saw you – and all today – I see. I used to love all this’ – he looked about him as if at things that were strange to him – ‘as if it were life, as if it were the whole of things. And now, if you weren’t here, if you were to go, it would be meaningless. I see that you’re the reason for it all – and that you are a part of it for me now, and that I must give it all to you and keep you here.”

All these brooding family tensions exist within a world of anxiety, raising tensions in Europe – everyone gathered round the radio for the night time news. What will war mean for the men of this Irish household? – will they go to fight for the British or not? And what will war mean for Angèle’s beloved France and her mother’s family who are all in Paris?

The Last of Summer is a slow, intense read – very beautifully written it captures perfectly a particular time and place.