The Rain Before It Falls

In his latest novel, Jonathan Coe trades in the side-splitting satire of his earlier work for a gripping family drama worthy of Alice Munro. Men are scant and beside the point in The Rain Before It Falls; as characters, they get about as much development as the book’s flighty poodle, Bonaparte. Women are the focus of this British novel, and the sins of these emotionally absent, knife-wielding mothers run deep.

Told through the eyes of a lonely lesbian aunt, Rosamond, the many-layered narrative is primarily composed of vignettes in which she tapes herself describing 20 family photographs while slowly committing suicide with whiskey and a fistful of Valium. In her will, the narrator requests that the recordings go to her cousin’s blind granddaughter, Imogen, who was given up for adoption years before. Rosamond’s mission is to tell Imogen about her family’s history; in the process, she hopes to break a cycle of neglect that has been perpetuated over three generations, from World War II to the near present.

Though The Rain Before It Falls is stripped of What a Carve Up!’s wit, Coe takes on familiar themes, most notably the interplay between image and reality: Peering at a photograph of a smiling aunt, Rosamond vividly recalls the hate in her relative’s voice, the way she smelled of dogs. Coe has always been interested in repetition and the difficulty of breaking free from history, and here he gives us a ghostly narrator who lives too much in the past. Noble as Rosamond’s mission may be, this novel makes it clear that she’s trapped in a closed circle.

—Janeen Potts