Book Review: Sheila Kaye-Smith's "The End of the House of Alard"

From one English family saga to another! I already had this book, given to me as a Christmas present. To read it right after Josephine Ward's One Poor Scruple didn't invite comparisons as much as highlight how different two novels in same genre can be so different. The title indicates what is going to happen in the novel: a family "house", the hegemony of a family, not just the building of course, is somehow going to come to an end. No heirs, no handing on of the family property or traditions: the end.

How the family's house ends is the story: who are the last members of the house of Alard? What did they do that brought it to its end? That's the story Sheila Kaye-Smith tells as three sons and three daughters deal with the legacy of their land-holding, mortgaged to the hilt, over-taxed (in their opinion), failing, image-conscious family. They have a hard problem to solve in the first place and Kaye-Smith's plot demonstrates how the choices their parents, especially their dictatorial father, and they make contribute to the decline and end of their house.

One reason I was interested in this novel when CUA Press announced its publication was that I had read some of Sheila Kaye-Smith's fiction before: Joanna Godden, Susan Spray--and Superstition Corner, the tragic story of Kate Alard in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. 

Kaye-Smith wrote that novel, which I first read in high school, after she and her husband, an Anglo-Catholic minister, were received into the Catholic Church. This novel, about the later Alard family--at least, I presume it's the same family--pre-dates her conversion to Catholicism, but an astute reader sees the sympathy for Catholicism in post-recusant England after World War I. At least three characters are Catholic (including the parish priest), one converts to Catholicism, and another is shaken by what he discovers and desires when he learns just a little bit about the Catholic Church after stepping into the local parish and meeting the priest. The traditional, non-religious Anglicanism of the Alard family in the early twentieth century has little basis to respond to the incarnational, costly and rewarding Catholicism Kaye-Smith describes it--particularly as Gervase describes it to Jenny on page 329:

"But Catholic Christianity stands fast because it belongs to an order of things which doesn’t change. It’s made of the same stuff as our hearts. It’s the supernatural satisfaction of all our natural instincts. It doesn’t deal with abstractions, but with everyday life. The sacraments are all common things—food, drink, marriage, birth and death. Its highest act of worship is a meal—its most sacred figures are a dying man, and a mother nursing her child. It’s traditional in the sense that nature and life are traditional....”

As the publisher's blurb describes the book:

The End of the House of Alard (1922) documents the choices made by the final generation of the aristocratic Alard family and the ways in which they, both willingly and reluctantly, bring the long line of their ancestral blood to a complete and sudden end. For some of them, the end of the Alard line is as painful to enact as it is for others to witness; for others it is welcomed as a necessary modernization or a true realignment toward religious integrity and universal human truth. Some of the family's children yearn for individual liberty; others have it forced upon them. But none of them can find it under the burden of the Alard name and its crumbling estate. The End of the House of Alard is a novel about the human need for purpose, for a truth by which to live and for which to die. It is a novel about faith and idolatry, love and death, freedom and bondage, nature and grace. Put another way, it is about how human beings cannot escape the great challenge of salvation, of breaking free from false, man made gods in order to unite instead with the divine love of Christ. The novel's characters span a breadth of options on this spectrum and their various outlooks on life continue to reflect those available to us today.

That's very accurate summary of the book, and the reader's interest is constantly maintained as the characters make their choices while the omniscient narrator explores their thoughts and feelings. Each of the sons and daughters of Sir John and his wife Lucy (nee Kenyon), Peter, George, Gervase, Doris, Mary, Jenny receive their due attention, as do the women the brothers marry or are in love with: Rose, George's wife; Vera, Peter's wife; and Stella Mount, the doctor's daughter, loved by both Peter and Gervase. 

Except for Ben Godfrey, the men in Mary and Jenny's lives are less important to the plot of the end. 

The crux of the story really is that Peter, demobbed from World War I in 1918, loves Stella Mount, but marries for money as a sacrifice for the Alard family legacy, and although he contends he loves his wife, he just can't let go of his love for Stella. 

Gervase loves Stella too, but he finds a greater love and follows it. The end of the house of Alard comes down to those two men, and I won't spoil the plot, except to say, inscrutably: The end of the end is the only end there could be.

There is verse at the beginning of the novel, lines from G.K. Chesterton's "The Secret People":

We only know the last sad squires rode slowly towards the sea,
And a new people takes the land . . .

The section titles of the novel are:

Part One: Conster Manor

Interlude

Part Two: Leason Parsonage (George, the Anglican minister deals with his vocation and faith in this section)

Part Three: Fourhouses (Jenny, the youngest daughter, makes her choice in this section)

Part Four: Scarecrow

Again, I highly recommend this novel and my only disappointment is that there's only one more book currently published in this series, The Dry Wood by Caryll Houselander. But there's a consolation to be had there too: Eighth Day Books has two copies!