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- Verified Buyer
Natasha Solomons has given us a lovely, lyrical piece of work in "The House at Tyneford. Her heroine is a 19-year-old Jewess, the daughter of wealthy Viennese parents. They send their daughter to England to become a servant... one of the few options open to Jews for escaping the madness that would soon engulf Germany and the surrounding nations.Elise Landau arrives at a magical place. Tyneford is a village perched on the rocky Dorset coast. She becomes a maid of all work in the household of Christopher Rivers, squire of the village. The characters are all somewhat familiar. We have the gruff but kindly butler, the gruff but motherly housekeeper, the impossibly snobbish titled neighbors and the handsome, flirtatious son and heir. In less capable hands, we'd have a "Reader, I married him" piece of fluff. But Solomons gives us a layered story, full of nuance, and her characters are more appealing for their familiarity.This is a love story, a story of loss, and a story about endings. It is beautiful look at English village life in that glorious time before the second world war destroyed and changed things forever. Elise must deal with a new life, completely alien to her privileged upbringing as the daughter of a prominent writer and celebrated opera singer. Her parents, Anna and Julian, remain in Vienna, waiting for visas to New York...visas that are constantly delayed. We see the situation in Vienna become more and more deadly for Jews and feel Elise's anguish at her inability to help her family. After relations between England and German deteriorate, she cannot correspond by mail and has no idea where her parents are, whether they have escaped to the fragile sanctuary of Paris, or as she imagines, are hiding in a Dutch farmhouse, some comforting equivalent to her own new situation.What sets this book apart is Solomons' wonderful use of language. Dandelions are scribbled across a meadow. Dark cormorants are 'shadow birds.' A lane of yellow primroses becomes 'a row of blondes." She has a gift for description that is charming and whimsical without ever becoming precious or self-conscious. There is real humor too, when Elise -- sick of her new life, angry at the blisters on her hands, tired of scrubbing kitchen stairs, resenting her bare attic bedroom, flees to the beach, where she has a temper tantrum, shouting out all the bad English words she can think of--but since her English is not good and she relies mostly on the dictionary and phonetics, her most profane oaths are "Testes" and "Cockles."Ultimately we are left with an unexplained mystery on our hands, which I won't reveal here, which which left me slightly unhappy at the end. Given that the rest of the book is such a delight to read, I don't want to quibble.One of the best of the "Upstairs/Downstairs" books I've ever encountered and worth every one of those five stars to lovers of the genre.The book is loosely based on a real incident. In the novel, the British army requisitions The House at Tyneford and the village surrounding it, ending not only an era, but centuries of village life and traditions. In fact, there was a town -- the tiny ghost village of Tyneham on the Dorset Coast, which featured an Elizabethan estate renowned for its architectural beauty and the beauty of its gardens. The house and the town both were taken over by the British Army after the second world war. It's new purpose was a training area for British soldiers. The house itself became a shelling target. The cottages were torn down or blasted to smithereens. Tyneham is now a no man's land, a place where soldiers learn to kill more efficiently and witnesses not permitted. Were it not for Solomons' book, most of us would never have heard of Tyneham. At least we can mourn the place and a time that we'll never see again.
