Not this long and winding road

As a teenager, when I wrote I had the tendency to emulate the authors I was reading. The books I read were often what was prescribed in school or from the depths of my parents collections. There was a lot of Oscar Wilde, a lot of Bernard Shaw, some Charles Dickens, some Shakespeare, some Jane Austen. Can you tell that the adults in my life were influenced by colonial imaginings of what constitutes a good book?

Had I picked up The Clockmaker’s Daughter all those years ago, I would have loved it. I would have loved how detailed the writing was, how deep each character’s story arc was, how convoluted the plot was, and how often we’re reminded of the setting. But I have (unfortunately) grown up and have (fortunately) reframed what a a good book means to me. Sadly The Clockmaker’s Daughter is not one of them.

The Clockmaker’s Daughter unravels the story of the summer of 1862, when an artist named Edward Radcliffe and his artist friends spend their time at a twin-gabled house, named Birchwood Manor. By the end of the summer, one woman is dead, one is missing, and Edward’s family heirlooms is nowhere to be found. Fast forward to 2017 when Elodie Winslow, an archivist, finds a satchel with a sepia toned photograph of a striking young woman in Victorian clothing, and sketchbook filled with sketches of a twin-gabled house. Elodie is determined to find out more about this house, and why it feels so familiar to her. Told through the voices of many characters spanning across time, we find out what really happened that’s summer.

The mystery of that summer is unraveled through the voices  of seven different characters who interact with Birchwood Manor in different capacities across time. The books jumps from time period to time period, and character to character, giving us little bits and pieces of each of their stories, all surrounding the house, and the mystery of the summer. That format made it hard for me to really be invested in any of their individual arcs. I didn’t care about their motivations, their conflicts (internal and external). The little details of their lives came across more as unnecessary rather than interesting. What irritated me was that when I did get invested in a character’s story, the character being explored would change and I would be reading  about a completely different person. I assumed we would eventually get back to them, and see their story tied up neatly in a bow but that wasn’t always the case. Did Elodie break off her engagement? Did she find peace in her mother’s death? What happened to Juliet between the time she lived in Birchwood Manor and the end of the book? Did Lucy die peacefully of old age?

More than adding to the function of the book, it seemed like author,  Kate Morton, wrote detailed stories about seven people and was forced to find a way to tie them together.

But I suppose the idea was to reveal the story of this magical house through the characters rather than center the book around the characters themselves. In which case, why did we learn so much about each of them? Why did we learn about the death of Leonard’s brother and Jack’s brother? Why did we need to know about the fight Juliet had with her husband when she first told him she was pregnant?

But I wasn’t entirely sold on the mystery behind the summer of 1862 either. In trying to engross myself into the characters, being sidetracked by their backstories that at times, I forgot that I needed to pay attention to a larger mystery. By the time the book came around to explaining it, there were too many threads and too many lose ends for me to care about it at all, leading to a rather unsatisfying ending.

Kate Morton is a lyrical writer, going deep into descriptions of characters and places. I was stuck by Birchwood Manor, wishing that it was a real place I could go see. I was especially impressed with the amount of detail that Morton wrote into Birchwood Manor itself. Clearly she put in a lot of research into creating the place, from the twin gables, the Japanese maple, and most of all, the little secret hiding place. Morton brought in the historical persecution of Catholic priests into Birchwood Manor. Similarly, she brought in the real displacement that people faced during world war 2 into the story of two of the characters.

But it didn’t make up for the lack of pace or the lack of excitement in the novel.

Morton is a good writer. It is her detailed writing that would have made me think of this as a good book all those years ago.  Reading The Clockmaker’s Daughter, I was reminded of those books from my teenage years when I had no framework to think about what made books good or not. I felt like I was reading a book that was prescribed to be good.  Maybe I would have enjoyed this book when I was eighteen. Now I just wished I wasn’t a completist and could just put the book down.