'You want to go on reading, you want to know what happens; it isn't easy to put down' Ruth Rendell
A powerful novel about a family, and how their lives are torn apart in a single, devastating moment.
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. Then, during a party for their daughter Pippa's baptism, their son Jeremy is knocked down on the road outside. It is their worst nightmare, something they thought could never happen, and the consequences will affect each one of them more than they could possibly imagine.
What is Claire's guilty secret, and can her wealthy, self-made father help? Will Mark, desperate to escape, have the nerve to leave? And how will Pippa be affected by the turmoil that began on the day of her own christening?
'A compelling story about the way a family copes with a catastrophe' THE TIMES
'A delight, a very polished read' CATHOLIC HERALD
'An accomplished first novel' TATLER
'Humane, thoughtful' HARPERS AND QUEENS
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-turvy 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. --Lisa Gee
