“The House at Riverton” by Kate Morton – Memories of a Bygone Era

The House at Riverton is Kate Morton’s first effort at a novel, and it is one set in England between the World Wars, following Grace, a house servant to the aristocratic Hartford family who live in Riverton. The story is mostly told through a flashback in 1999, when Grace is almost a hundred years old and is asked by a young movie director to tell him the events of that house.

As it turns out, life in the Riverton house was full of secrets an deception, especially when a young poet shot himself in 1924 during a social gathering, an even witnessed only by the Hartford family daughters and shared with Grace. Beneath all the layers of secrets Grace is trying to uncover, we get to see how quickly people change, and how life was in an era which isn’t very far from today, but feels like it happened eternities ago.

I have to say that especially for a debut novel, The House at Riverton is quite a resounding success. Even though I’m generally not very interested in the Edwardian aristocracy and high-class English societies, I found it to be quite interesting, especially to see how an entire way of living was destroyed in a matter of years. 

We not only get fairly accurate and in-depth descriptions of how life was back at the beginning of the 20th century for English aristocrats, but we also get a very enthralling demonstration how the changes in the world affected them.

Indeed, the focus on the novel isn’t to solve any one mystery; there are many of them, and just so you don’t get disappointed, not all of them are resolved… and herein lays its beauty. Certain mysteries are best left unsolved, because what makes them so captivating is that there will always be a hole to fill with your imagination, one which gives itself to many different explanations. 

It’s a bit like the orange suitcase in Pulp Fiction (1994); don’t you find it would have taken some life out of the movie if we were shown what was causing that orange glow? This mystery gave birth to so many theories, with some people even claiming that it held Marcellus Wallace’s soul in it. That’s exactly the case here, with this book: the reader is left to plug some of the holes in the story with his or her mind, actually giving you some control over how things play out.

Finally, I’d just like to add that from what I gathered, this book is mostly about memories and how fast things can change, and sometimes spin out of control. It is a bit of a meditation as to the importance memory plays in making us who we are, and how it can serve our purposes as well as betray us. All in all, I found it to be an amazing read and recommend it to anyone who wants to read something a bit different next time they open a book. 

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Kate Morton Personal site Kate Morton is an author hailing from Australia who has enjoyed local and international success with her writings, with some of her more respected books including The House at Riverton, The Forgotten Garden and The Distant Hours. She often made the bestseller lists in the UK and locally, and her novels have already been published in more than 38 countries.