The House of Broken Bricks
By Fiona Williams
Faber & Faber Ltd
ISBN: 978-0-571-37956-9
380pp.

The House of Broken Bricks, the debut novel of Fiona Williams, is a literary work of note. It has an engrossing story line couched in exceptional prose, which is not surprising in a book that has won many accolades, including the 2021 Bridport Prize while still in its infancy and while Williams was still doing a masters in creative writing.

The novel with its lyrical descriptions of the natural world, evokes memories of Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing. Just as the beauty of the marshlands of North Carolina is celebrated by Owens, so is the charm of the flora and fauna of a West Country (southwest England) village and river eulogised by Williams, who has a degree in biological sciences. Her love for the surrounding world glistens on every page.

The book title, The House of Broken Bricks, is both literal and metaphorical. Houses along the river of the West Country village featured in the book are actually made of discarded broken bricks used as ballast by bargemen who ply the river. Though made of defective bricks, such houses weather well through floods and snow and stand their ground, as do the hardy, albeit damaged, people who reside in them.

The book brings out the problems and bigotry that are caused by differences in skin colour. At the centre is the multiracial marriage of Richard, who is white, and Tess, who is of Jamaican descent, like the author. They fall in love at university. When Tess becomes pregnant, she willingly drops out, gets married and moves to the West Country village which Richard calls home. The villagers are all white and the advent of Tess is received variously with distaste, curiosity and rejection.

Tess is delivered of twins who are, by a one in a million chance, totally different from each other, one being white like the father and the other black. Now the issue of race becomes knottier. People do not shy from calling them freaks and making hurtful comments. Tess is often taken for the nanny. Richard, who has generational roots in the village, is accepted but his wife and children pose a dilemma.

A prize-winning debut novel brings into perspective colour prejudice and the pleasures of the natural world, while being a virtuoso performance in the art of writing

The novel is constructed so that each member of the family presents his/her own point of view in separate chapters. Williams brings the characters to life on the page. We suffer and exult with them. As the story unfolds, the pressures of alienation, village gossip, the fraying marital relationship of the parents, bullying, financial woes and, finally, tragedy shake the family to the core, and it teeters on the brink of disintegration.

Tess comes through as a woman with one layer of skin missing, where colour prejudice is concerned. Except for a very few villagers, they all rub her the wrong way. Her love for her children is incandescent but she finds it difficult to give Richard any leeway. Hugging her own suffering to her bosom and yearning for her happy past in London, she disregards Richard’s tormented efforts to deal with the burdens of the family and his work. What solace she finds is in baking elaborate sweet treats in the middle of the night.

Richard, who has the fewest chapters in which to express his feelings, is lonely and lost. Because he has known all the villagers since childhood, he is everyone’s friend and generously helps all who call upon him. But he is perennially short of time as he tries to make a go of his market gardening business. When bills pile up, the oblivion offered by the pub becomes irresistible.

Max, the white twin, is relentlessly bullied at school. The more he suffers, the more he becomes inept at social interaction. He is isolated but finds comfort in the companionship of his twin. The quarrels boiling up between his parents only deepen his misery. Sonny, who looks exactly like his mother, is a bright and cheerful child. He tries to help his father, support his mother and reassure Max. But is it going to be enough?

Williams expertly lifts the veils of secrets swirling round the family. The reader gets to the heart of the matter, logically and inexorably, but only at the finale. The one blemish in the novel is the use of obvious ploys, such as the introduction of ‘rainbow twins’, and the reality of Sonny. Also, literary novels usually end in a more open-ended manner.

The novel is a paean to the author’s Jamaican heritage. Tess remembers with nostalgia the Jamaican enclave in London where she was brought up. She whips up exotic Jamaican dishes every day for her family, often sharing them with her favourite neighbours. Her mother and sister, unlike Richard’s parents who are aloof and disconnected from the family, have a big role in her life. Being Jamaican, Tess’s mother feels obliged to help her financially even into adulthood and her sibling always has her back.

Williams’ description of the West Country through the four seasons is a tour de force. She displays the perils and pleasures of living there through the eyes of the four main characters. Tess responds to the seasons with mood swings of her own. For Richard the seasons spell out a gardening calendar, which has to be adhered to willy-nilly. Max and Sonny roam freely and observe all, neither missing the large herons nor the tiniest buds and insects, and their awe becomes ours. The book has pages of descriptive passages which are all presented with such a deep knowledge and love of nature that even an invasion of wood lice seems picturesque.

The use of language in The House of Broken Bricks is masterly. The vocabulary is simple, the only unfamiliar words having to do with plant and animal life. Yet the composition of every sentence is perfect. Every word fits in its place like a gem in its setting and the similes and metaphors are works of art.

The prose flows as effortlessly as a stream and the reader is swept up with its currents into exactly the emotion desired by the author. The House of Broken Bricks is not only a novel, it is a virtuoso performance in the art of writing.

The reviewer is a freelance writer, author of the novel The Tea Trolley and translator of Toofan Se Pehlay: Safar-i-Europe Ki Diary

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, December 8th, 2024