2020/89: Magpie Lane -- Lucy Atkins

I remember the day she spoke to me for the first time because that was the day I found her in the priest’s hole eating dead bees. [loc. 1544]

Magpie Lane opens with a police interview: a girl of 8, Felicity, has gone missing, and her nanny Dee is being questioned. Over the course of the novel, and the interview, she reflects on the events that have led to this point: her first encounter with the new Master of an Oxford college, Nick Law, and his desperate need for a nanny for his daughter; the high-flying lives of Nick and his pregnant second wife Mariah, a restorer of vintage wallpaper; the shadowy figure of Ana, the deceased first wife who was Felicity's mother; the historian Linklater who shows Dee a side of Oxford that she had never realised existed; and at the heart of it all, Felicity, who likes to collect bones and relics, who is terrified of the cupboard in her room, and who does not speak to anyone except her father.

It's Felicity who is the focus of Dee's narrative: a lonely, frightened child, with a great deal of trauma in her past and -- perhaps -- a sensitivity to the supernatural. Nick and Mariah metamorphose from genial, grateful (if occasionally dictatorial) parents, neglecting Felicity but trusting Dee to care for her, to vengeful opponents recasting Dee's time in their employment as a time of deceit and betrayal.

It's true that Dee has secrets, a past she hasn't revealed to anyone. Once she was a promising mathematician: she still works on a mathematical proof, and she teaches Felicity about Penrose tiles. Something catastrophic happened to her twenty-six years before the events of this novel: only gradually is that catastrophe revealed, and Dee's background sketched out. That background, it turns out, informs her relationship with Felicity, and perhaps also with Linklater.

I'm in two minds about this novel. I found almost all of it immensely compelling, thoroughly readable, well-paced and without unnecessary twistiness: however, I was unconvinced by the Epilogue, when the truth of the matter becomes apparent. That truth makes perfect sense but there are aspects of the situation that seem rather too easy.

Still, an accomplished Gothic novel with a supernatural element that's subtle enough to be dismissed as a product of the characters' imaginations. Dee is an excellent narrator and protagonist, and my heart ached for Felicity (and thoroughly approved of her upsetting Mariah with bones and circles of salt). I really liked Dee's plain, raw voice, and the atmospheric descriptions of Oxford. I'll read more by this writer.