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Summary
Summary
A grand old manor house deep in the English countryside will open its doors to reveal the story of an unexpectedly dramatic day in the life of one eccentric, rather dysfunctional, and entirely unforgettable family. Set in the early years of the twentieth century, award-winning author Sadie Jones's The Uninvited Guests is, in the words of Jacqueline Winspear, the New York Times bestselling author of the Maisie Dobbs mysteries A Lesson in Secrets and Elegy for Eddie, "a sinister tragi-comedy of errors, in which the dark underbelly of human nature is revealed in true Shakespearean fashion."
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Sterne, the English country house at the center of this remarkable dark comedy, is home to the Torringtons-mother Charlotte, a widow now married to Edward Swift; children Emerald, Clovis, and "Smudge"; and an assortment of faithful staff. Set sometime in the early part of the 20th century, somewhere in the north of England (the ambiguity is telling), the novel takes place over a single day, April 30. A celebration is underway for Emerald's 20th birthday, and what appears to be a Wodehouseian comedy with a touch of Dodie Smith is derailed when a local train jumps its track, soon filling Sterne with stranded, shocked passengers. The "uninvited guests" are decidedly lower class and deliberately indistinct, but for one notable exception: Charlie Traversham-Beechers, who seems to know a good deal about the family, particularly Charlotte. Jones's (Small Wars) characters are delightfully eccentric, the wit delightfully droll, and the prose simply delightful. But for all its charm, this is a serious book; it's no coincidence that the new day dawning at its close is May Day, or International Workers' Day, though Jones's theme is less class warfare than the seemingly absolute divide between the classes. Agent: Stephanie Cabot, the Gernert Company. (May 1) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
We're in English country house territory in Jones' novel, but it's not exactly Downton Abbey. Sterne is on the verge of ruin, and most of the servants have left. Edward Swift goes to Manchester to try to avert catastrophe, leaving behind his wife, Charlotte, and his three stepchildren, Emerald, Clovis, and Imogene (Smudge) Torrington. A few friends have been invited for dinner to celebrate Emerald's twentieth birthday. Then come the uninvited guests, survivors of a train accident on the branch line. It is hoped that they can stay at Sterne until the railway company comes to take them away. One, Traversham-Beechers, attaches himself to the house party, and everyone tries to carry on with the dinner plans while the ghastly people (third-class passengers, all) huddle in the library. In the course of the evening, romantic attachments are formed, secrets and true selves are revealed, and people rise to the occasion. Part comedy of manners and part ghost story, this novel is full of surprises. It is Jones' third, following The Outcast (2008), winner of the the Costa First Novel Award, and Small Wars (2010).--Quinn, Mary Ellen Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Jones has followed "Small Wars," her muscular novel of honor and violence in 1950s Cyprus, with a delicious tea sandwich of genres set in post-Edwardian England. The springboard for this daft contraption (in varying parts drawing-room comedy, ghost story, horse story and, most improbably, love story) is a birthday party for the eldest daughter of the Torringtons, a doleful manor-house family who say things like "I'm so sorry, you must think me a terrible turnip" and whose precarious economic status is embodied in a broken settee that collapses beneath anyone foolish enough to sit on it. The celebration is forestalled by a nearby train derailment that floods the Torringtons' hallways with a throng of down-market passengers and one demonic aristocrat, all in need of shelter. Doing their best to "contain" the intruders, the prodigiously self-involved hosts bungle the soup course, but get their just deserts. The author's command of period archness tips its hat to a pantheon of social satirists: Luis Buñuel in cahoots with Oscar Wilde and Jane Austen. Jones's caustic takedown of 1-percenter exceptionalism arrives like a divine gift to occupying party poopers everywhere.
Guardian Review
Naming, as the book of Genesis affirms, is a dominant and defining act. For parent or for author, the choice of a name creates echoes and reveals a ragged tapestry of relationships. The more unusual the name, the stronger the associations. In The Uninvited Guests, Sadie Jones calls her young male lead character Clovis, and thereby summons up Saki's tart, macabre voice and his stories of Edwardian country-house life with its shibboleths, comeuppances and cruelties. Saki (HH Munro) was greatly interested in revenge, with the supernatural frequently acting as its agent. His recurring hero, Clovis Sangrail, is a lord of malice and misrule, cloaked in the lazy elegance of a young English gentleman. Sterne, the Edwardian country house which is the setting for The Uninvited Guests, is under threat. Clovis, Emerald and Smudge Torrington, their mother Charlotte and her second husband, Edward Swift, are all clinging on to Sterne, but there is no more money. The house will have to be sold, unless Edward can pull off the vaguely shameful feat of borrowing from "an industrialist of low morals". But meanwhile there is Emerald's 20th birthday party to be held, in Edward's absence. The neglected youngest child, Smudge, plots a Great Undertaking in her bedroom. Charlotte hides a guilty past, while her children don't bother to conceal their resentment of the man who has replaced their father. So far, so Saki. But Saki was of his time and he died with it, an over-age volunteer who enlisted as a private and was shot by a sniper in a shell-crater on the western front. Jones, by contrast, looks back on the Edwardian era across 90 years of interpretation and cultural accretion. The ingredients have been used so many times: the isolated house that generates its own society, the sharp class distinctions, the hurdle race towards matrimony, the aromas of crime, mystery and intrigue. Sterne's giant black yews, ancient, extravagant roses and softly bowed boards are familiar to the modern reader, not because they reflect our first-hand experience but because books, films and television have made them, oddly, our own. Jones plays with this familiarity, prompting it, teasing it, and then, disarmingly, undermining it. Her tone is coolly playful, even detached. The birthday party is to be a small affair, just family and a few close friends. It expands, terrifyingly, when a railway crash brings to the house a flock of stunned survivors, like birds who have flown into glass. The railway authority decrees that it is Sterne's responsibiity to take in these travellers until further arrangements can be made. They are third-class passengers, and immediately recognised as such by Sterne's inhabitants, who lurch from pity for the "poor things" to wariness in case they become "rowdy and unmanageable now that they're warming up and realising their good fortune". Their good fortune, as Jones slyly emphasises, consists in being given a cup of tea and kept pent up, away from the other guests. Even the relatively considerate Emerald "did not stop to consider that the morning room was not large, or that the fire in it may be dying". The passengers, hungry, quelled but desirous, seem to grow in numbers and uncanniness as the evening wears on. Meanwhile, Jones's own lord of misrule, Charlie Traversham-Beechers, takes charge of the party. Where Saki would be ruthless, Jones relents. There is sunlight and the smell of bacon. There is resolution, even restoration. Evil only seems to show its face, and it is energy itself which becomes the hero of the narrative. The task of the living, it appears, is to make sure that the dead stay dead, rather than to appease them. Fear won't do it; anger won't do it, and it turns out that the operative force has got to be love. The story scuds along, veering close to pastiche, although the luscious prose is precisely steered. But another current is at work within the novel, and because The Uninvited Guests is a creation of the 21st century, historical knowledge cannot help but force itself on the narrative. Clovis, the guests Ernest and John and all the other young men may sit at their breakfast tables on a spring morning eating bacon, relieved that the battles of the night are done. Jones and her readers know that they are plunging towards a collective fate. Mud and death wait for them; the passengers are not the only ghosts in the novel. And we, reading it, see for a moment our own ghostliness coming through to us. Helen Dunmore's The Greatcoat is published by Hammer. To order The Uninvited Guests for pounds 9.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop - Helen Dunmore The birthday party is to be a small affair, just family and a few close friends. It expands, terrifyingly, when a railway crash brings to the house a flock of stunned survivors, like birds who have flown into glass. The railway authority decrees that it is [Sterne]'s responsibiity to take in these travellers until further arrangements can be made. They are third-class passengers, and immediately recognised as such by Sterne's inhabitants, who lurch from pity for the "poor things" to wariness in case they become "rowdy and unmanageable now that they're warming up and realising their good fortune". Their good fortune, as [Sadie Jones] slyly emphasises, consists in being given a cup of tea and kept pent up, away from the other guests. Even the relatively considerate Emerald "did not stop to consider that the morning room was not large, or that the fire in it may be dying". The passengers, hungry, quelled but desirous, seem to grow in numbers and uncanniness as the evening wears on. Meanwhile, Jones's own lord of misrule, Charlie Traversham-Beechers, takes charge of the party. - Helen Dunmore.
Kirkus Review
Strange goings-on at an Edwardian country house. Jones (Small Wars, 2010, etc.) quickly establishes a tension-riddled scenario. Charlotte Torrington Swift is in danger of losing Sterne, the grand manor bought for her by her adoring first husband, who couldn't afford it and died leaving a pile of debts. Second husband Edward is off to Manchester to try and save Sternenot that this wins him any favor from petulant Clovis and Emerald, who have never liked their stepfather. Edward will miss Emerald's 20th birthday party, to which childhood friends Patience and Ernest Sutton have been invited; spoiled but good-natured Emerald worries that the clever, unfashionable siblings will be rudely treated by her ill-tempered brother and their status-obsessed mother. Circumstances become even more unpromising with the arrival of survivors of a terrible crash on the nearby branch line, whom the Great Central Railway informs Charlotte will have to be hosted overnight. There's something very odd about these passengers, and odder still about Charlie Traversham-Beechers, another survivor and an old acquaintance of Charlotte's, though she's clearly alarmed to see him. Traversham-Beechers is invited to the awkward birthday dinner, while housekeeper Florence Trieves struggles to find food for his increasingly rowdy fellow passengers. He uses a self-invented game, Hinds and Hounds, to encourage the airing of everyone's unpleasant opinions about each other, and the game ends with Traversham-Beechers' ugly revelations about Charlotte's past. At this point, what seemed to be a savage comedy of manners takes a 90-degree turn and becomes a supernatural confection. There's no question about Jones' skillthe novel is cleverly constructed and written in smooth prose. It's quite a step down in ambition and moral seriousness, however, from her two previous novels. The nasty climax to Hinds and Hounds, obviously intended to make a statement about the human capacity for evil, has its impact muffled by the deliberately implausible happy ending, modeled on a Shakespearean romance. A peculiar change of pace for this gifted author.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Can there be anything more properly British than a weekend house party in the country? The down-on-their-luck Torrington siblings, who with their mother and stepfather make up the household, have great hopes for this weekend for many reasons; it would appear that the few invited guests have motives of their own for coming. It is the entirely unexpected and somehow unusual group of passengers from a railway accident, foisted on the household, who will provide a catalyst for true change by the end of the novel. VERDICT Excellent characterization combines with a plot sprinkled with hints of secrets to be revealed to produce a page-turning read that blurs the edges of the country house mystery. In her third novel (after the Costa First Novel Award-winning The Outcast and Small Wars), Jones demonstrates a talented writer's versatile imagination and originality. [See Prepub Alert, 11/21/11.]-Pamela O'Sullivan, SUNY at Brockport Lib. (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
