On the day of Emerald Torrington's 20th birthday party, shortly after the beginning of the century in the 1900s, Emerald's stepfather, Edward Swift, leaves for Manchester to try to borrow the money to keep the family in their dilapidated country manor, Sterne. The rest of the household is preparing for the birthday guests, but the day is disrupted when a railway accident on a nearby branch line leaves the family responsible for a group of dazed third-class passengers.
Shortly before they go in to dinner, a final passenger, the sinister yet oddly appealing Charlie Traversham-Beechers, arrives and starts charming Emerald's brother. Emerald's mother appears and recognizes the new passenger with horror, but the revelation is delayed by the passengers clamouring to be fed, whereupon hosts and guests summon up a bit of Blitz spirit avant la lettre and set to work in the kitchens.
As a storm rages outside and the dinner guests finally relax, Traversham-Beechers takes control of the evening, finally revealing his purpose for being there in a splendidly awful climax. After this, the tension is lessened, but Jones continues to keep our interest as we wonder how several of the characters will be able to repair the damage they have inflicted on one another, and whether the first stirrings of love and attraction will be irretrievably wounded by the night's unexpected brutalities.
This is not Downton Abbey: The Torrington-Swifts are not aristocrats, and the novel does not explore the inner lives of the people on both sides of the green baize door, showing us that servants have feelings too and letting the upper crust off the hook by making them ambivalently reasonable about social change.
Rather, The Uninvited Guests, like Jones's two previous novels, The Outcast and Small Wars, takes an uncomfortably close look at how decent people's better selves can be comprehensively abandoned in a crowd. In this sense, the isolated house is more a device to keep the characters pinned to the board, both in location and morally speaking, constrained as they are by the etiquette and morals of the period.
In The Outcast, her first (and Orange Prize-short-listed) novel, 10-year-old Lewis Aldridge is unmoored from his life of privilege and security after his mother drowns, and Jones depicts the cruelty of not just his peers, but also their parents, abandoning Lewis in his grief and need, and then casting him as the villain. Small Wars portrays a marriage against the backdrop of the Cyprus Emergency, and the pressure one soldier faces as he gradually comes to understand that he alone is honourable.
Structurally speaking, The Uninvited Guests is just about perfect. It covers 24 hours in seven acts, from a subdued and strained breakfast on Emerald's birthday to a much more cheerful and sensuously described breakfast the following day, and would work very well on stage. Moments of tension arrive slowly and deliberately, not hustling the reader past the important scenes.
With each novel, Jones has tethered her characters more firmly to their period. In The Outcast it was sometimes easy to forget that the novel was set in the fifties, but Small Wars and The Uninvited Guests are more successful.
It's not just the historical detail that has improved over time, though; with each novel, Jones has gained understanding of her craft. Deadline pressures, a complete change of direction, having a stab at something ambitious or experimental: All of these can cause a good writer to let go of a novel too early. Jones's books, however, are highly polished and carefully controlled, written in prose that is reminiscent of a bar of Pears soap: clean and clear, and possessed of a formal vintage charm. More light-hearted than Jones's previous books, but no less piercing in its observations, The Uninvited Guests is an elegant and accomplished novel.
Special to The Globe and Mail
J.C. Sutcliffe writes about books at www.slightlybookist.wordpress.com .