Private Rites

Susan's Review

Julia Armfield’s new novel is set in a climate apocalypse of relentless rain, ferocious floods, pervasive mould and listing, subsiding houses. But unlike other works about the devastations of climate change, Private Rites doesn’t act as a warning for us to change our current attitudes and actions; instead, it presents the end of days as having already arrived. What also sets this novel apart from other examples of environmental dystopias is a focus on the recognisable normality of people’s daily lives: their complaints about work, the rent, failed modes of transport, relationship squabbles, what to make for dinner. What emerges is not a sense of fear or despair about the imminent collapse of the world, but the seemingly irrational persistence of ordinary human needs and desires. While houses are crumbling and bridges collapse, life in all its daily banality goes on.

At the heart of Private Rites is a domestic drama: the story of three sisters, Isla, Irene and Agnes, all of whom feel damaged by their wealthy, brutally unloving father, but who don’t even like, let alone love, one another. It’s an ironic take on Shakespeare’s King Lear: Armfield’s three daughters deny their tyrannical father access to their lives and refuse his offers of substantial sums of money. And unlike King Lear, who relinquishes his power, Armfield’s architect father reinforces patriarchal authority by designing houses for the rich that tower, momentarily at least, above the treacherously rising waters. In this world of obscene economic inequality, the story of the sisters’ mutual disdain and animosity makes for a psychologically absorbing, at times acerbically funny read. Nor does the fact that the sisters are all queer – a reality that can be read as spurning the patriarchal order – give them a shared sense of identity. Here, too, Armfield’s focus is not on the unusual or different, but on the ordinariness of sexual relationships, in which sexual excitement coexists with petty annoyances, tenderness with childish sulks.

Private Rites is Armfield’s third work of fiction, and I think it’s her best yet. The three main characters are always compelling: a bracing mix of selfishness and self-castigation, of dogmatism and uncertainty. The physical setting is evocative; brilliantly atmospheric. Armfield also creates a mounting sense of gothic apprehension: a shadow in a doorway, unexplained noises, unknown faces that at the same time seem disturbingly familiar. The feeling that someone, or something, is watching the three sisters leads to a shocking conclusion: one that will have you literally gasping for air, and which changes everything the sisters had assumed about their conflicted lives.

Publisher's Review 

From the bestselling author of Our Wives Under the Sea, a haunting, heart wrenching novel of three sisters navigating queer love and faith at the end of the world.

There’s no way to bury a body in earth which is flooded

It is a fact consigned to history along with almost everything else

It’s been raining for a long time now, for so long that the lands have reshaped themselves. Old places have been lost. Arcane rituals and religions have crept back into practice.

Sisters Isla, Irene and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their estranged father dies. A famous architect revered for making the new world navigable, he had long cut himself off from public life. They find themselves uncertain of how to grieve his passing when everything around them seems to be ending anyway.

As the sisters come together to clear the grand glass house that is the pinnacle of his legacy, they begin to sense that the magnetic influence of their father lives on through it. Something sinister seems to be unfolding, something related to their mother’s long-ago disappearance and the strangers who have always been unusually interested in their lives. Soon, it becomes clear that the sisters have been chosen for a very particular purpose, one with shattering implications for their family and their imperilled world.

Praise for Julia Armfield:

‘Armfield writes so gracefully’ - THE TIMES

‘Evocative yet grounded’ - OBSERVER

‘A chilling vision of a future capital that I’ve found impossible to shake’ - INEWS

‘Ballard-ian in apocalyptic scope … Deeply, passionately, messily human’ - PAUL TREMBLAY

‘A signature cocktail of deadpan wit and staggering beauty’ - ALICE SLATER

‘Brilliant, original … an era-defining writer’ - KALIANE BRADLEY

‘Every page guillotines you with its wisdom’ - TOM BENN

'Brilliantly audacious' - GUARDIAN

'Stunning' - DAZED

'Her prose sparkles' - ELIZA CLARK

’A must read’ - GLAMOUR