Pain and fear are like that, an explosion that sets the genes alight. I imagine the flames racing along ... like coal seams catching fire. [loc. 1301]
Every novel by Catriona Ward is unsettling: each is different to the others. Sundial is no exception. Rob is locked in a toxic relationship with her unfaithful husband, Irving. After a crisis involving their daughters Annie and Callie, Rob decides that it's time she and Callie did some serious mother-daughter bonding. They'll have 'the best time ever' at Sundial, the isolated desert house where Rob and her sister Jack grew up. Callie is uneasy about the trip: she's worried about what Annie will get up to in her absence, and her friend Pale Callie is full of theories about Rob's true agenda. But Pale Callie isn't ... well, she's not entirely reliable. And nobody else can see her.
Slowly we learn the history of Rob and Jack, growing up home-schooled by Falcon and Mia, more or less oblivious to the endless parade of graduate students who come to Sundial to work with Mia on her experiments with dogs. (Some of the scenes with the dogs are viscerally unpleasant, others deeply upsetting.) Rob and Jack are twins, very close: but Jack is changing in ways that Rob isn't. That change holds the key to Callie's oddities -- but there are aspects of it, and of her own past, that Rob only gradually comes to understand over the course of the novel.
The two narratives, Rob and Callie, kept me guessing almost to the end of the book. I didn't find them especially likeable characters to start with, but they are extraordinarily vivid, plain-spoken without being straightforward, and their claustrophobic relationship is brilliantly observed. Nothing in this novel is what it seems: the rosebush over the grave, the hole that Rob digs, the buried secret, Mia's research... There are just enough inconsistencies to keep the reader engaged, to indicate that there's more beneath the surface. (Actually I think there might be some red herrings too. Contact lens solution?) And the resolution, though spectacular, doesn't attempt to tidy away every thread.
Sundial is unsettling and sometimes upsetting, truly tragic and often lyrical. Ward's eye for detail heightens the sense of claustrophobia, and the feeling of something unseen, out of focus, apprehended in glimpses. I keep thinking about aspects of the characterisation: Callie's relationship with food, and Rob's (neither of which involve judgement or commentary); Rob's boarding-school stories, written out by hand; Irving's gaslighting.
Thanks to NetGalley for an advance review copy, in exchange for which I have written this honest review. UK publication date 10 MAR 22.
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