Instructions For A Heatwave - review by Nicky Pellegrino

On the face of it Irish-born writer Maggie O’Farrell’s sixth novel Instructions For A Heatwave (Hachette, $36.99) is a classic disappearance story. In north London, in the boiling hot summer of 1976, recently-retired Robert Riordan pops out to the shops for a newspaper and never comes back. But Robert’s unexplained absence is almost an incidental, there to provide O’Farrell with a reason to explore the topic that really engages her – family dynamics.

The mystery of Robert’s disappearance brings together his wife, formidable Irish matriarch Gretta, with the couple’s three warring children, Michael Francis, Monica and Aoife.

Delving into these four characters and the blows that have fractured their relationships, O’Farrell shapes a cross-generational tale of feuds and fallibilities.

This is a family in crisis. While Gretta has done all she can to instill Irishness in her children – baked them traditional soda bread, taken them to Irish dancing classes, insisted on regular mass and communion –they have gone their own way despite her and made a mess of their lives. Michael Francis married young and his wife is now too busy rediscovering herself to want much to do with him. Monica has ended up an unhappy, lonely stepmother trapped in the countryside. Difficult, dyslexic Aoife has run away to New York. All seem destined for further disaster.

In the oppressive heat they gather at their childhood home to search through their father’s belongings for a clue to his whereabouts.

Farrell’s characters are all finely drawn but it is Gretta who gets most of the colour. With a noisy tendancy to melodrama and a fierce passion for  religion and family, she is the largest presence in the novel. Eventually it becomes apparent she knows more about the events behind her husband’s diappearance than she wants to let on.

This novel is all about the gradual building of its characters and since O’Farrell is an acute observer of people, insightful and emotionally intelligent, there is no faulting it on that score. Yet the story failed to engage me as much as I wanted it to –  paling in comparision to her 2006 best-seller, The Vanishing Act Of Esme Lennox - and I finished it feeling vaguely unsatisfied despite every loose end being tied up neatly as can be.

Perhaps the issue is that the mystery is kept mostly offstage rather than being played out at the story’s centre. Maybe all that dysfunction and  angst just got to me.

O’Farrell is a writer with experience and flair. Her Riordans are skillfully created and entirely believable as a family and I suspect that’s the real problem. Dominated by their mother, passive, self-obsessed and really quite whingey, if they really did exist I’m not sure I’d want to spend time with any of them – not even Aoife the outspoken rebel.

Instructions For A Heatwave is a convincing slice of life. On the whole it is well-written, structured and detailed. Yet for me that extra something special found in her previous books is missing from this one.

About the reviewer. Nicky Pellegrino, an Auckland-based author of popular fiction, is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above review was first published on Sunday 17 March 2013.

Her latest novel When In Rome is set in 1950's Italy and was published in September 2012. Her next novel, The Food Of Love Cooking School, will be published later this year