by Jonathan Coe.

Knopf. 240 pages. $23.95.

BY KRISTIN LATINA
Special to the Journal

There’s nothing like long-buried family secrets to stir up drama. In Jonathan Coe’s latest novel, The Rain Before It Falls, a 73-year-old woman passes away and leaves a set of audio tapes detailing her life for her niece and grand-nieces.

Rosamond initially makes the tapes for a girl named Imogen. But when her niece Gill can’t locate the girl, she and her daughters listen to the tapes in order to understand who Imogen is and why Rosamond is compelled to tell her story.

Coe has Rosamond tell the story using photographs from each important period of her life. Rosamond must describe the photos in exhaustive detail because Imogen is blind. Coe does a great job of making Rosamond seem simultaneously old-fashioned and ahead of her time. She is consistently gullible when dealing with her older cousin Beatrix and the abuse that spans three generations of the family. On the other hand, she speaks very frankly about her sexuality and her attempts to make her way as a single woman in 1950s and ’60s Great Britain.

As she works her way through the pictures, Rosamond paints a picture of women ruined by the neglect and resentment of their mothers. Gill and her daughters are mesmerized by her story not simply because it’s a tale they’ve never heard before, but also because their mother-daughter relationships are so different from the ones Rosamond describes.

Coe has an elegant writing style that lays bare the essence of Rosamond’s struggle without excess sentiment or overstatement. The story moves along swiftly, catching the reader up in the family saga and illustrating the positive and negative consequences of Rosamond’s fundamental decency.

When Rosamond at last tackles the part of her narrative that deals with Imogen’s childhood, she has a revelation of her own: “Even in my mid-forties, I still had this callow, overly benign view of the world. I still believed that reconciliation was possible; and more than that, how flattering it was, to my own self-esteem, to suppose that I could be the person to bring it about!”

This idea of making peace and putting right what once went wrong in the family is a pretty common thread running through family relationships. What Rosamond comes to realize is that she never had the power to break the destructive cycle that her own aunt and cousin set in motion. All she can do is add her point of view to the family history, so that others will know and hopefully learn from the past. THE RAIN BEFORE IT FALLS,

kblatina@hotmail.com