Mark and Claire seem an ideal couple. He is an accountant, she the daughter of a successful businessman. They live in a comfortable middle-class village in Surrey. When the novel opens they are giving a garden party to celebrate their daughter¿s baptism. During the party their son Jeremy is knocked down on the road outside when chasing after an escaped rabbit. He survives, but to all intents as a vegetable. Unable to speak, only grunt, incontinent, spoon-fed and propped up each day in front of a television.
The once ideal marriage is troubled by the stress, the pressure caused by Jeremy¿s state of health. Mark holds down his job only because the firm for whom he works gets substantial business from his father-in-law. Claire stays at home, looks after her declining son and young daughter and neglects her husband. Mark suggests a holiday on their own. But Claire refuses, because she worries about leaving Jeremy in care. Mark goes to Portugal on his own and meets a young widow with children on the beach. He is tempted to pursue an affair. He considers divorce, but worries about the guilt of leaving Claire with their crippled son.
When her younger sister, Sally, an MP, launches a Private Members¿ Bill to legalise euthanesia, the Press assumes she is doing it for her sister and besiege Mark and Claire¿s home.
All the time Jeremy¿s stage of health is in slow decline. But is Jeremy the glue that holds the marriage together, however tenuously? Ann Widdecombe uses the analogy of the dead tree, once the glory of its garden, and now the host for a clematis that once a year covers it in flowers. Jeremy, she says is like the tree, passive; the clematis is the parental love that embraces him.
In the climax to the book, Jeremy¿s life reaches a crisis and he dies. What will happen to Mark and Claire¿s marriage now? Will they be up to the challenge of rebuilding their marriage without their son?
Mark and Claire and their families are celebrating daughter Pippa's christening in the back garden of their substantial Surrey house. Everything's going swimmingly: their four-year-old son Jeremy is playing with almost-four-year-old Michael and arguing with his dad about whether he can call next door's dog, Rags, through the hole in the hedge.
Then the white rabbit appears--an escaped pet--and Jeremy chases it. But instead of leading Jeremy down a rabbit hole, like Alice, into a topsy-turvey world of mad hatters, petulant queens and hookah-smoking caterpillars, the rabbit careers straight out onto the road. Jeremy follows--"there was no 'don't' to cover the present situation even if he had not been recklessly intent on the pursuit"--running headlong into a red sports car being driven at 60 miles an hour by a young man who had had too much to drink.
He survives. But he's paralysed from the neck down and severely brain-damaged.
The Clematis Tree follows the attempts of Jeremy's family to live their lives in the years following the accident: coping as Jeremy's health declines, dealing with their grief, guilt and the conflicting feelings of love and resentment for Jeremy and for each other. While Mark becomes increasingly ineffective at work, Claire, using her son's needs as an excuse, retreats into a self-imposed isolation, and Pippa suffers from her parents' growing irritability. Then Claire's younger sister Sally, the flame-haired Conservative backbencher introduces her Terminally Ill Persons Bill--designed to legalise euthanasia. And suddenly the press are interested in Jeremy.
Politician Ann Widdecombe's first novel is a deeply serious investigation of the effects of tragedy on nuclear and extended families, and an occasionally didactic and unfashionable paean to faith and duty. --LisaGee
