Voices in an Empty Room

by Francis King

A sister loses her brother, a mother loses her son, a wife loses her husband, and the cross-correspondences in the silent voices from beyond the grave are revealed in an unsettling climax

Genres: Fiction

Paperback

First published November 3, 2009

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

Francis Henry King, CBE, was a British novelist, poet and short story writer.

He was born in Adelboden, Switzerland, brought up in India and educated at Shrewsbury School and Balliol College, Oxford. During World War II he was a conscientious objector, and left Oxford to work on the land. After completing his degree in 1949 he worked for the British Council; he was posted around Europe, and then in Kyoto. He resigned to write full time in 1964.

He was a past winner of the W. Somerset Maugham Prize for his novel The Dividing Stream (1951) and also won the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Prize. A President Emeritus of International PEN and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he was appointed an Officer (OBE) of the Order of the British Empire in 1979 and a Commander of the Order (CBE) in 1985.

Reviews

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

My 14th book in a deep dive of the novels of King; his 19th from 1984.

This is rather a peculiar book; divided into 7 sections, the first two tell the story of Sybil Crawfurd, whose brother Hugo, both of them active in a local Paranormal Society, has been doing experiments in ESP with a pair of young non-identical twins. After he falls to his death from a hotel balcony in what may or may not be an accident, Sybil consults a medium trying to get in touch with him.

The 3rd and 4th sections tell the story of Lavinia Trent, a famous actress, whose truculent illegitimate son commits suicide by hanging, and her own desire to contact him postmortem.

The 5th and 6th concern dowdy widow Bridget Nagel, whose journalist husband has died covering the Falklands War, who is taken in by a conman purporting to have been a soldier who attempted rescuing him when injured, and her attempts to contact him in the afterlife.

Then the final section brings all three women together in their various distresses to work out a final reconciliation with their grief, which is expertly done - but till that time, it seems as if King were just telling three separate short stories with common themes, and then decided to link them.

It isn't a BAD novel, but some of it is rather disconcerting and distasteful, especially the sudden and rather shocking revelation that Hugo has been carrying on an illicit affair with one of the 12-year-old boys. which he drops casually into an otherwise mundane conversation, thusly: 'It was better to accept an afternoon of failure in order, later, to have more success. And more money,' he added with the bitterness of the etiolated child's sperm on his tongue. p. 103. (!!)

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the flyleaf of the jacket of the 1984 hardback edition from Hutchinson:

"The desperate wish for 'but two hours' converse with the dead' animates the central characters of Francis King's new novel. Wounded almost beyond endurance by their separate bereavements, they seek for certainty in that most elusive and tantalizing dimension of the human spirit, communication through the paranormal.

"Sybil is close to her brother Hugo, so close that they have vowed to remain undivided even beyond the grave. After Hugo's strange death, Sybil's quest begins. It brings her in contact with Lavinia, a successful former actress whose public career hides a chilling private desolation, and with Bridget, whose loss of her husband in the Flaklands conflict has left her numbed and emotionally defenceless. In a seamless narrative of the highest skill and subtlety, Francis King charts the presents and pasts of these three very different women in their search for proofs of human survival. The answers they receive are tenuous, fragmentary, sometimes dishonest - but their always remains, fitfully and faintly illuminated, the distant and mysterious threshold to a consoling epiphany."

Once again I quote entire the publisher's blurb from the time an older novel was first published because I don't believe reviews are for plot exposition and also because it often reveals what the author wanted potential to know when embarking of the reading of his novel. This is, like all of King's novels that I have read, superb. Every review I write includes praise of him as one of the great, overlooked and unrecognised, writers of English prose in the 20th century.

"‘A writer’s writer, his voice utterly convincing,’ praised Beryl Bainbridge, comparing King’s talents to those of Graham Greene and Nabokov. Melvyn Bragg declared him a ‘master novelist’, while A.S. Byatt pronounced his writing ‘always accomplished and elegant’. When King died, age 88, in 2011 - by then the author of 50 books - The Scotsman described him as ‘one of the finest and most remarkable of English novelists of our time’. Yet he remains sadly under-appreciated today, and the majority of his books are out of print. This is all the more unfortunate because not only was he an extraordinarily accomplished storyteller, never content to rest on his laurels and write the same book twice, he had an outlook on life that set him apart from the pack." (from: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booke... a site that all readers of this review I recommend reading).

King examines people and situations and, for me, his work remains undated and eternal. His portraits of people resonate truth because he is looking at the eternal verities not the current popular ide fixe derived from media headlines. This may not be the novel to start with if you have read nothing else by Francis King (I would recommend 'The Dividing Stream', 'An Act of Darkness', 'A Domestic Animal' or 'A Japanese Umbrella') but if you already know King's work, even if only through his short stories then I am sure you will love it.

[Michal.F]

I found “Voices in an Empty Room” on sale in my local independent bookstore, and I paid 1 Swiss franc (less than one British pound). The premise was capturing—three women, each of them lost a man in their life—a brother, a son, a husband—on the same day. The narratives interweaves the past and the present in the “was” and “is” chapters, to zoom in on the individual context of the death of every man.

The writing is camp, unexpectedly comedic at times, and positively engaging and captivating. Though I enjoyed the read, the premise promises way too much than the novel actually offers. Whilst the three independent stories works amazing as standalone narratives of death and loss, the attempt to put them together is rather disappointing. Nonetheless, I’m tempted to explore other writings of Francis King!