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Angela Tomaski’s debut novel is a delicious comfort read about loyalty and despair, and a gentle questioning of the nature of progress. Crumbling stately home Thornwalk is on the verge of becoming a luxury hotel. The ancestral owners are all dead – with the exception of a pair of rapacious cousins, naturally – and the only person left to mourn is the loyal valet (and maybe more?) of the old master.
Maximus, last guardian of the house, guides the reader on a final tour through Thornwalk, and the lost lives, loves and brass buttons of the titular Gilberts: Lydia, the eldest girl, desperate to fall in love; Hugo, the stubborn eldest son; “poor little Annabel”, dreaming of writing; quiet runaway Jeremy; and unstable actor Rosalind. He takes us, room by room, trinket by trinket, stain by stain (blackcurrant to blood) through 100 years of family life before it is all lost for ever.
Inspired by the National Trust’s 2002 purchase of Tyntesfield, a sprawling gothic mansion outside Bristol acquired just weeks after the death of the reclusive resident baron, Tomaski’s debut is a quarter-century in the making. Tyntesfield contains at least 47,154 catalogued items. The same might well be true of The Infamous Gilberts, a novel full of things, and structured around things. The 70 chapters each correspond to an item or absence of an item. They are a veritable feast of small things: Monopoly pieces, ammonites, baby clothes (never worn). Everything, no matter how broken or aged, is precious because of the people who touched it, used it, abandoned it. When the new owners plan to replace the carpet with “an exact replica”, Maximus laughs: the original, he tells us, “is fifty per cent Gilbert DNA … and the scurf of fifteen beloved Labradors and one Miniature Schnauzer with dermatitis”.
The reverent, drily funny tones of the old family retainer never fail Tomaski: she neatly ventriloquises exactly the voice the reader expects to hear, a sort of The Remains of the Day with the horror stripped out. While there is nothing especially startling in the character of Maximus, there is still a great skill and deftness in a pitch-perfect rendering of something so familiar. And there is so much that is familiar here: so many moments and stories that resonate with other tumbling family sagas. The lure of the big house has never left us; the lure of the big house in decay is more compelling still. The Infamous Gilberts joins the ranks of Joanna Quinn’s The Whalebone Theatre and Lissa Evans’s Small Bomb at Dimperley, other comfort reads with a skeleton in the cupboard. It is difficult to write something new in a genre as comfortably crowded as a Victorian sitting room, and Tomaski doesn’t really try: instead, she executes the thing so diligently as to set the standard.
Surprise is not the point here; rather, delight. This is, in a very real sense, an impeccable book: as precisely rendered as a collector’s doll’s house, as poised and perfect as a diorama in a museum. Everything is drawn out and ordered with the same love and care that Maximus has for Thornwalk, and for Hugo.
As with all exquisite small plates, there is a slight – and perhaps unavoidable – yearning to stop and get McDonald’s on the way home: a longing for something salty and fatty and filling to cut through the wisps of elegant wist. While much undeniably happens in The Infamous Gilberts – axes, asylums, escapes, affairs, missing children, missing adults, madness, betrayal, despair – the distancing act of the narrator keeps us curiously insulated from anything that feels too much like plot. “That will do, I think,” Maximus says, when he feels in danger of showing too much. “You get the general idea.” When terrible things happen, he relays them to us at a safe distance, both of class and time. We are never in danger. It is hard, in this slow, droll, nostalgia-fuelled telling, to feel that anyone was ever in danger, even as they die before our eyes.
“A lot more could be said,” Maximus says at one point. “But I shall not say it.” The Infamous Gilberts is a debut, and like all debuts raises the question of what comes next. What will happen when Tomaski permits herself to say the unsayable? What will she write when she turns that gimlet eye for precision, for perfect detail, on the people, rather than their things?
