When I first read the description to Claire Fuller’s follow novel up to Swimming Lessons, I somewhat expected an odd version of The Sea, the movie written, produced and starring Angelina Jolie and her soon to be ex husband, Brad Pitt. In The Sea, the middle-aged distant couple travel to a sea side hotel in France where they stumble upon a peep hole in the wall that allows them to peer in on a younger couple who reminds them of themselves and forces them to take gander at their own injustices.
In Bitter Orange, there is a peep hole, but there is also a darker, more haunting aura to the novel. Claire Fuller’s main character, Frances Jellico, a middle aged woman who is recovering from her mother’s recent death, which unfortunately was drawn out by an elongated sickness where Frances played the role of caregiver. There is a Norman-Bates-esque feeling to Frances, except she seems to lack the extreme lunacy. However, there is a sense of hysteria throughout the novel as a now aged and declining Frances reflects on the whimsically haunting summer so long ago, in the 1969, at the Lynton’s dazzling but decaying mansion located on a seemingly paradisal country side in rural England.
Frances found herself surrounded by the lush botanic and echoing chambers within the abysmal mansion and then came along a quizzically ravishing, attractive younger couple, Cara and Peter. The first impression of the captivating but desperate Cara is where she is passionately yelling in Italian at Peter and curiously takes off on her bicycle. Frances discovers a man-made peephole in her floorboards that allows a glimpse into Peter and Cara’s bathroom.
Frances forms her first adult friendship with the beguiling pair who generously wine and dine her and offer her cigarettes, which being a virgin to smoking, she happily obliges. Cara begins to casually divulge her mysterious past in a puzzling manor that seems to linger with Frances’ budding and fresh curiosity. Little secrets are slowly revevealed, like the fact that Cara doesn’t speak full Italian and there was once a fatherless child.
Claire Fuller’s cryptic and pictorial prose is unarguably addictive as I finished the novel in two days, I was in the least, captivated. The way that she eloquently weaves descriptions of baroque architecture with the mystifying illumination of the summer braided with Frances’ new found love for Peter and the mystical first hand adventures of Cara transports you to the sentimental summer that haunts Francis on her death bed.
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