A splendidly eccentric debut novel, The Infamous Gilberts by Angela Tomaski tells the story of the once illustrious Gilbert family through the eyes of their elderly retainer, Maximus. Welcoming the reader as a curious visitor, Maximus takes us to Thornwalk, the now deserted and decaying family estate, his final tour before relinquishing the keys to the inevitable luxury hotel developers. Each room, nook and discarded item he introduces us to prompts revelations of scandal, perfidy, and more than a dash of insanity; the Gilbert loves and losses set against a twentieth-century backdrop defined by the reverberations of war and the decline of the great English country house.
A local since birth, Maximus remembers the glory days of the Gilberts’ merchant empire, when they were celebrated in the London counting houses. As he begins his comprehensive tour of the house, he tells us disapprovingly that their unfortunate downfall was the subject of widespread ‘tawdry gossip’. There will be no gossip here. Whilst fully aware of the family members’ various misdemeanours , Maximus is devoted to their memory. Through telling us the stories behind numerous items (such seemingly innocuous objects as a button between the floorboards, a pile of mouldy hay, a library request slip), we will come to know the five fatherless Gilbert children and their somewhat feeble mother.
Tomaski presents us with a page-turning treat, cleverly plotted, its often dark humour delivered in the droll tones of Maximus. He tells us of mother Margaret, and her offspring, Hugo, Jeremy, Lydia, Rosalind and Annabel (the children have been told that their father died a war hero, although they’ve never been shown his medals). With a dwindling income and frazzled nerves, Margaret is reliant on the aid of the formidable Aunt Beatrice. With her ever-present sly dachshund and ‘a hint of mothballs around her handbag’, Beatrice presides over childhoods that will result in one scheming married-off niece, one B-movie starlet of a very British type, an ex-soldier with PTSD, the one that gets away, and the one that doesn’t , small, sad and medicated, possessed in later life of terrible grey hair yet still ‘the eyes of a child’.
Tomaski is good on the family’s time and place in history. The eldest son gets the only education they can afford, the girls are paraded in front of various rich would-be suitors (no matter their advanced age or general appallingness).
The world wars bring their own difficulties, not only the dead and the damaged, but the effects of post-war societal change. Economic turmoil has led to fewer job prospects locally and men who made it back from the battlefields are leaving to find work in the towns.
‘Families who had worked the land and loved the house for generations scattered to the wind like so many dandelion seeds, like so many diamonds in a Romanov crown’.
With its unique storytelling device, this quirky and original take on the family saga genre makes for a thoroughly memorable and recommended read.
The Infamous Gilberts by Angela Tomaski is published by Fig Tree, 304 pages.
