The Cliff House by Amanda Jennings

I often pick up books about Cornwall as it is a favourite haunt of mine. It’s a romantic, beautiful setting but it’s history of struggle between the haves and have nots goes back centuries. This tension between local and wealthy visitor still resonates through the pages of this book set largely in the 1980s.

Tamsyn is as local as it gets. Her grandfather worked the tin mines, her father was a lifeboat volunteer and her brother is struggling to find work that’s not seasonal. Tamsyn’s attachment to The Cliff House comes to a head in the summer of 1986. To her, the house represents escape, perfection and her last link to her father, who brought her here to swim in the pool when the owners were away. Her father felt rules were made to be broken and they both consider it madness to own such a slice of perfection overlooking the sea yet rarely visiting except for a few weeks in the summer. Now Tamsyn watches the Cliff House alone and views the Davenports as the height of sophistication. Their life is a world away from her cramped cottage, her Granfer’s coughing and his red spattered handkerchiefs and their constant struggle for money.

Tamsyn is firmly a have not. Her hero father died rescuing a drowning child and now she has to watch her mother’s burgeoning friendship with the man who owns the chip shop. Her brother is unable to find work but finds odd jobs and shifts where he can to put his contribution under the kettle in the kitchen. Mum works at the chip shop but is also the Davenport’s cleaner. She keeps their key in the kitchen drawer, but every so often Tamsyn steals it and let’s herself in to admire Eleanor Davenports clothing and face creams and Max’s study with a view of the sea. Yet, the family’s real lives are only a figment of her imagination until she meets Edie.

Edie Davenport is a disaffected teenager with heavy eye make-up, black clothing and a love of The Cure. The two girls hit it off and Tamsyn learns that Edie has been expelled from her exclusive girls school. She has a spiky relationship with her Mum and as readers we can see why. While Tamsyn seems oblivious to the problems of the family, the reader can see a family already disintegrating. Max hides away writing and is accused of having multiple affairs by his wife. Eleanor is an alcoholic, on medication for depression and seemingly paranoid about her husbands behaviour. As the summer goes on, their relationships worsen and we get a sense that the Davenports are the worst kind of rich people; to quote from The Great Gatsby, they are people who are careless of the lives of others. The summer party shows the couple at their decadent worst and it is fitting that the final acts of the novel occur surrounded by the detritus of that night.

 Tamsyn wishes her mum were more like Eleanor at times. She butters her up by helping with her make-up, painting her nails and letting her borrow her clothes. Yet she never sees her as an equal to her daughter. The scene where Tamsyn realises that she hasn’t been invited to the party, but is expected to work in the kitchen is particularly painful. I found myself very caught up with Tamsyn’s narrative - possibly because I remember being an awkward teenager from a poor background at a school full of middle class kids. I only start to question her motivations very late in the novel. I know she is becoming obsessed with the house and family, but underestimated how seriously she takes her link to house. As Edie meets Tamsyn’s brother Jago and their mutual attraction becomes clear, Tamsyn’s jealousy is obvious. There is a sense from here on that this entangled lives and simmering tensions will reach a crescendo - rather like Jago points out, the seventh wave is always the largest and comes crashing over the rocks below.

I won’t reveal the ending only to say it didn’t conclude the way I expected. I was left feeling like I’d underestimated some characters and I wanted to go back and read their sections again to see if they read differently now I knew the eventual outcome. I think, very cleverly, some characters were deliberately understated so that more volatile and explosive characters seemed to be driving the narrative. I felt left with the question of how we feel when we get what we’ve always wanted? Are we left haunted by what we had to do to succeed? And is our victory celebrated or largely empty? Ultimately, as s reader, it made me realise how much trust we place in our narrator and how effective it is when that trust is misplaced.