The Distant Hours in Aussie Readers

Feb 15, 2014 Kathryn rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, 5-stars, australian-authors, related-to-time, reading-list-2016

I loved this - it took me about a week to read, which is slow for me, but that isn’t a reflection on the book itself. It’s a longish book (my edition was just over 600 pages), so that was part of it, but another part was that I didn’t want to read it when I only had 20 minutes to read - although I still did read it in little chunks at times - but I really wanted to read it when I could be immersed in it for hours. I loved the references to books and reading. The story is being told by Edie, who I loved this - it took me about a week to read, which is slow for me, but that isn’t a reflection on the book itself. It’s a longish book (my edition was just over 600 pages), so that was part of it, but another part was that I didn’t want to read it when I only had 20 minutes to read - although I still did read it in little chunks at times - but I really wanted to read it when I could be immersed in it for hours. I loved the references to books and reading. The story is being told by Edie, who works as an editor. I loved the passage where she described how she first realised her love of reading when she was ten years old, home sick with mumps and comforted by a library book her mother gave her:
"I probably coughed self-pityingly in response, little aware that I was about to cross a tremendous threshold beyond which there would be no return, that in my hands I held an object whose simple appearance belied its profound power. All true readers have a book, a moment, like the one I describe, and when Mum offered me that much-read library copy mine was upon me. For although I didn't know it then, after falling deep inside the world of the Mud Man, real life was never going to be able to compete with fiction again. I've been grateful to Miss Perry ever sense, for when she handed that novel over the counter and urged my harried mother to pass it on to me, she'd either confused me with a much older child or else she'd glimpsed deep inside my soul and perceived a hole that needed filling. I've always chosen to believe the latter. After all, it's the librarian's sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.”(p29)

I loved the sense of expectation and the promise of revelations to come:
“Writing it down now, I’m a little disappointed in myself. But everyone’s an expert with the virtue of hindsight and it’s easy to wonder why I didn’t go looking, now that I know what there was to find.”(p18)
And this one:
“I would learn the answers to my questions, though not for some time yet. I would learn other things too, secret things, answers to questions I hadn’t begun to dream of asking. But back then all of that was still to come.”(p51)

And Kate Morton’s writing was just beautiful with wonderful descriptions:
“She had shrunk into the chair and her clothing seemed oversized, draping from one bone to the next. Her story had left her spent, her eyelids sagging and the fragile skin shot through with blue; it struck me as wretched that a daughter should have to suffer the sins of her father in such a way.”(p519)

This was a wonderful Gothic story - it gave me the same feeling as Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale. The climax did come during a crashing storm, which seemed an incredibly Gothic cliché, but what's wrong with a bit of cliché?? And the ending was satisfying - which is always a relief with a good book - sometimes the ending can be terribly disappointing.

I have more favourite quotes from the book, but will refrain from quoting any more, bar one:
“I don’t have many [friends], not the living, breathing sort at any rate. And I don’t mean that in a sad and lonely way; I’m just not the type of person who accumulates friends or enjoys crowds. I’m good with words, but not the spoken kind; I’ve often thought what a marvelous thing it would be if I could only conduct relationships on paper. And I suppose, in a sense, that’s what I do, for I’ve hundreds of the other sort, the friends contained within bindings, pages after glorious pages of ink, stories that unfold the same way every time but never lose their joy, that take me by the hand and lead me through doorways into worlds of great terror and rapturous delight. Exciting, worthy, reliable companions - full of wise counsel, some of them - but sadly ill-equipped to offer the use of a spare bedroom for a month or two.”(p19-20) I can't explain what it is about Kate Morton's writing that I like so much, but she has woven some sort of magic over the words as she's strung them together and they made me drink them in with such anticipation and delight!

The only disappointing thing now is that it is finished - and that whichever book I now pick up will most likely suffer by comparison! ...more

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Oct 14, 2010 Kate Forsyth rated it it was amazing

Shelves: historical, historical-mystery

I loved this book! The Distant Hours is the story of a modern day girl obsessed with discovering the secret of her mother’s past involvement with a mysterious family of three sisters, daughters of a famous children’s writer. The contemporary detective tale is woven together with the stories of the past, and in particular with the father’s most famous book, The Secret History of the Mud Man. A suspenseful historical page-turner, with a touch of the gothic and a dash of romance, this book has a lo ...more

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Sep 22, 2010 Laura rated it it was amazing

Hush...Can you hear him?
The trees can. They are the first to know that he is coming.
Listen! The trees of the deep, dark wood, shivering and jittering their
leaves like papery hulls of beaten silver; the sly wind, snaking through
their tops, whispering that soon it will begin.
The trees know, for they are old and they have seen it all before.

- The Distant Hours, Kate Morton

The opening epilogue of Kate Morton’s The Distant Hours draws you into the mysterious world of Raymond Blythe’s children’s cl Hush...Can you hear him?
The trees can. They are the first to know that he is coming.
Listen! The trees of the deep, dark wood, shivering and jittering their
leaves like papery hulls of beaten silver; the sly wind, snaking through
their tops, whispering that soon it will begin.
The trees know, for they are old and they have seen it all before.

- The Distant Hours, Kate Morton

The opening epilogue of Kate Morton’s The Distant Hours draws you into the mysterious world of Raymond Blythe’s children’s classic The True History of the Mud Man; the realm of one child’s nightmare. The story continues into 1992, where Edith Burchill’s mother Meredith, receives a long lost letter with the return address of Milderhurst Castle, Kent. Discovering that her mother was billeted 50 years before as a 13 year old child during WWII at Milderhurst Castle, her mother masks her emotion well and Edith suspects that there may be more to the letter than her mother is willing to let on. Edith then unintentionally finds herself lost on her drive home to London one day, winding up in the small town of Milderhurst with the overwhelming sensation of déjà vu, a shimmering remembrance of having been there before as a child with her mother, a memory her mother shrugs off as a childhood fancy. Edith winds up staying overnight in the village and taking a tour of the castle the following mourning, meeting the sisters Blythe; the twins, Persephone and Seraphina and their much adored younger step sister Juniper, who believes Edith is none other than her mother, Meredith returned to help her back to London to look for lost fiancé, Thomas Cavill.

Accepting a job to write a new introduction to celebrate The True History of the Mud Man’s seventy fifth anniversary, Edith finds herself back at Milderhurst Castle on the request of Persephone Blythe; an opportunity to discover her mother’s past and the secrets held within the whispering castle stones, the ‘distant hours’ whom have waited years for someone to whisper their secrets to.

The Distant Hours is filled with rich storytelling and provokes a sense of place; her descriptions are so lively I walked the countryside of Kent and the cool stones of Milderhurst castle listening to the stones whisper their secrets. It reminded me of being a greedy child, unwilling to put my book down to eat or talk about it until finished, curled up in my favourite hidden spot, locking out the world loosing myself to the pages in front of me. This was a truly beautiful book, an atmospheric story flitting between the war years in England and Edith’s present day London, full of unforgettable characters beleaguered by love and circumstance, haunted by past memories.

Like the layers of an onion, the novel reveals its secrets to the reader gradually and although it’s towards the end of the novel that we get to read the ‘lost letter’ it words hardly seem to matter; the characters also evolve, you categorise them as you would a living person; but by the end of the novel I had re categorised them; learning their secrets seemed to justify the reasons why they did what they did and you ask yourself whether they could have done it any other way? The end of the novel is it’s crux, it brings everything together; we learn ‘what happened that night’ the night Juniper returned from London to await the arrival of Thomas Cavill to announce their engagement to her sisters; the reason why Juniper had blood on her blouse and couldn’t remember why, a childhood loss of memory when exposed to trauma (lost time), we learn of Seraphina’s struggles; her lost love and childhood nightmare that destroyed an entire family and Persephone, the family’s pillar, the fixer, whom we learn had a forbidden love and suffered immensely when her love married a man. Not forgetting Meredith, the different child whom loved to learn and didn’t want to follow in the steps her mother had set out for her; who thought her only friend in the world who understood, Juniper, had run off with Thomas and forgotten her.

Edith winds the story up by not writing the new introduction for the seventy fifth anniversary edition, but hands it back to Adam Gilbert who was initially commissioned to write it. After listening to Persephone’s story, albeit interpreted differently from the truth; promising that she would do as Persephone asked, she tells the authorities that Thomas Cavill’s body is buried within the pet cemetery and Oliver Skyes in the old moat; a human life is braceted by a date of birth and a date of death and it was most important for Persephone that their deaths be recorded, a closing point.

The story began with the Mud Man and ends with the Mud Man, it’s ironic that The True History of the Mud Man made Raymond Blythe but also destroyed him, the child’s nightmare momentarily became reality and by a twist of fate, it destroyed the love and dreams of a hauntingly beautiful, different young women but reinforced ‘family ties’ and saved the castle from being turned over to the Catholic Church. Edith and Meredith’s relationship is renewed and the story closes with Edith moving into her newly renovated attic apartment above her bosses Victorian house in Notting Hill where occasionally she glimpses the ghosts of a young happy couple, sitting on the windowsill where the cherry stains seemingly refuse to be painted over, the sparrows continue to visit for breadcrumbs and a sprig of honeysuckle sits in an old jam jar discovered when the renovations commenced.

It’s a rare thing when an author usurps their first novel, then continues to do so each novel following; I found myself ensnared by The Shifting Fog, then taken over by the otherworldliness of The Forgotten Garden, but absolutely lost within the pages of The Distant Hours; this would have to be my favourite of Kate Morton’s novels and that’s saying alot as I very much loved the Fairytale wound around the Forgotten Garden and thought about it often after setting it down. The Distant Hours is a WOW novel, one of those novels that makes you happy and sad at the same time, that is so atmospheric that you’re wound up in the realm of the Mud Man and the sisters Blythe, as well as England’s panic during the war years and Edith’s struggle to uncover her mother’s secrets and renewal of their mother daughter relationship. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this novel to anyone; it will remain a part of me for days, if not weeks to come; a much favoured novel.
...more

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Jan 24, 2011 Clare rated it it was ok

Shelves: adults

This book dragged on for too long and felt like all the colour had been drained from the story. The only thing that kept me going was wanting to understand the mystery, it was disappointing that nothing else held my interest. I couldn't warm to the characters, even the interesting ones still felt bland. And there was so much description padding the pages. I'm a Dickens fan and don't mind complex description when it's integrated with character and narrative development, but here it doesn't serve ...more

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Dec 20, 2010 Marg rated it really liked it

I am not sure why but I struggled with this one a bit more than I expected to. I liked it when I was reading it, but found it easy to put down and not go back to.

The book is way overdue at the library!

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