Graham Norton - A Keeper

Rating: 3/5

Review:

Excellently written but slightly disappointing

Graham Norton has shown himself to be a very good, insightful and humane writer. All these qualities are plain in A Keeper, but as a novel I didn’t think it quite delivered.

The story is told in two time-frames; Elizabeth Keane returns to the small town in the west of Ireland where she grew up to deal with the estate of her recently dead mother. She discovers a cache of letters from the father she never knew and we get the intercut stories of her search for the truth of her origins and of the events of the past as they happened. It’s a sad, rather bizarre story whose lessons are mirrored in current events for Elizabeth.

Graham Norton writes beautifully. As in Holding (which I enjoyed very much) it is a delightful surprise that an apparently frivolous, rather waspish TV host can create such rounded, human and sympathetic characters and conjure atmosphere and sense of place so evocatively. Early on, for example, we get a poignant picture of the emotional bleakness of revisiting a now-unoccupied childhood home and excellently painted portraits of relatives whose desperation to pry and to get their hands on things from the house is dressed up as concern for Elizabeth.

A Keeper is a pleasure to read in this respect, but I didn’t find enough real content to keep me fully engaged. There is a tension, but its resolution is signalled early on, the Life Lessons applied to Elizabeth’s current situation felt a bit clunky, and the emotional insights didn’t seem that original, however beautifully portrayed the characters may be.

Overall, this didn’t deliver as much for me as Holding. However, this may be just a personal response; A Keeper is very well written and well worth a try to see if it suits you, even if I’m a little lukewarm about it.

(My thanks to Coronet for an ARC via NetGalley.)