Toffs suffer too
From Louise Guinness Sir: I was shocked by Olivia Glazebrook's review of Helena McEwen's novel The Big House (Books, 29 January). The ,Big House is a remarkable first novel which has received glowing reviews in all the broadsheets. It describes one year in the life of, and from the perspective of, a six-year-old girl, in the light of the stark descriptions of two tragedies with which the book opens: the suicide of one sibling and the drowning of another 20 years later. It has the freshness and charm of Esther Freud's Hideous Kinky and is populated with characters as eccentric and appealing as those in Dodi Smith's I Capture the Castle. The scenes of childhood are presented as neither happy nor sad, but contain some painful incidents and some very funny ones. 'To anyone other than a reader of the Daily Telegraph this childhood is idyllic,' Olivia Glazebrook writes, and she appears to dismiss the narrator's brave attempt to accept the unacceptable deaths of her siblings on the grounds that toffs with enough food and a comfy bed have no busi- ness talking about suffering. On this nonsen- sical premise we could all laugh at King Lear's howls following Cordelia's death.
Louise Guinness
Marlborough, Wiltshire
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