Private Rites by Julia Armfield
Three sisters navigate the fallout of their estranged father's death in this soggy, speculative reimagining of King Lear by acclaimed author Julia Armfield
Private Rites follows three estranged sisters navigating a waterlogged city and the quotidian fall-outs of living through climate disaster. They are brought back together to clear out White Horse, their recently deceased father’s home and floating architectural magnum opus.
Our protagonists are flawed and sometimes dislikeable but fully drawn with rich personalities and relationships: eldest Isla is recently divorced and at odds with herself; Irene can’t give up the past to create a future with her partner Jude, and their half-sister Agnes lives on the peripheries, encountering intimacy fleetingly and always ready to run.
The setting of an interminable climate disaster permeates the novel, with pragmatic details around city infrastructure adapting through constant floods and grassroots queer club nights still happening during the apocalypse. The novel moves slowly, echoing the sense of the characters treading water, not quite ready to look down at what might be beneath the surface. A speculative reimagining of King Lear, it is unsurprising that the spectre of the patriarch Stephen Carmichael looms large. However, Armfield chooses to highlight the beauty and tension of the sisters’ relationships with each other and their self-made lives.
Those familiar with Armfield’s prose, either through her debut novel Our Wives Under the Sea or her short story collection salt slow will be unsurprised to find Private Rites a similar masterclass in lyrical descriptions, tension and tactility, and atmospheric settings.