Rating:

“If they are lucky enough to find each other out here on the edge of the world, they deserve to be left alone, don’t you think?”

Author: Sarah Maine

Hetty has recently inherited Muirlan House, a mansion isolated on Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. The house, a beacon of former wealth and privilege fallen to ruins, is stranded on its own island and is only accessible when the tide is at a certain ebb. It was the home to Hetty’s famous ancestor, the painter and darkly brooding recluse, Theo Blake. Hetty has dreams for this house: a bed and breakfast or perhaps a golf resort. She sets out on her own, leaving her cloying boyfriend, only to discover that her rose-tinted dream is stained with old blood and buried secrets.

The dream dies when Muirlan House’s grumbling caretaker, James, finds a human skeleton buried under the conservatory floor. He also claims that the house cannot be salvaged, but he has ulterior motives. It appears that Muirlan House was hated from the beginning. Theo stole the land from the hardworking people, kicked them off it, and made a breathtaking monument to idol wealth and hubris. The hate runs deep, and Hetty discovers that the island people want her and her family gone.

Meanwhile, as Hetty ponders her future, the author brings the past alive, taking us back to 1910, when the house was still glorious and the artist in his prime. Theo has just taken Beatrice as his bride and brought her to this isolated, hated mansion on its own island. Soon, the marriage falls apart, and Beatrice forms an unsteady connection with Cameron, an angry young man who disdains Theo’s interference while, at the same time, shadowing him constantly. Something is going on between the two men, something that might answer Beatrice’s suspicions. But soon, she drifts her own way, and the house becomes just another dark corner to hide secrets.

The House Between Tides is sharply atmospheric, a sea-soaked, far-flung Daphne du Maurier-ish story tinged with romance and loss and irresistibly scandalous gothic secrets. The present, with our weak-spined Hetty, is a slog, but the past comes alive. Beatrice, Cameron, and Theo all dance around one another. Fires of resentment and love burn in the unsaid, the unspoken, and the regretted. We, being the omnipotent reader, can jump between the minds of these people, all presumably long dead, and soon we form alliances.

Beatrice is our true main character, the star who steals the show. She is an innocent young bride, but she is no fool. There is a touch of the worldly here, a wild woman who has allowed herself to reside in society but has no pretensions about what it is and what it says. She is at times docile and at other times reckless, forming a love with the island that she can never have with her drifting husband. Beatrice is real, and her growth and transformation, her suspicions and the risks she takes, all endear us to her. By the end, we’re invested just as much in Beatrice and her story as we are in the beautifully melancholic atmosphere, the sea mists shrouding a brooding manor that should never have been built.

We also spend some time in Theo’s mind, but not as much. Just enough to get a hint of what the real secret is, why he cannot be happy with his wife, and why he brings nothing but misery to others. Theo is a trapped creature, and we have some sentiment for him, but mostly he is the depressive catalyst that that keeps the story tragically gothic. What isolated island with an austere mansion does not need a grief stricken, alcoholic, secretive artist with a love of shooting and stuffing endangered wildlife?

Cameron is the third central character in the 1910 drama, and the one issue in an otherwise sublimely traumatic triangle. His relationship with Beatrice, which begins with hostility, grows too quickly, and the dynamics between the two, as they change, are not fully earned. We need the change for the drama, of course, but it could have been more smoothly done, more believable. As it is, Cameron’s simmering rage, while justified, becomes irritating at times, and his transformation into another kind of man entirely – a disastrously romantic one – needs more finesse than it is given.

But that ending – that revelation when we find out just who’s body is trapped forever entombed in the hated house! That is utter literary perfection, bringing readers to our collective knees as we tug our hair and shout “no!” all why realizing that yes, yes. How else could it have ended?

The House Between Tides was so close to perfect. The only issues were Cameron’s unnecessarily quick character change and the inclusion of Hetty and her annoying modern-day romance. But it didn’t matter that it wasn’t totally perfect, because it was almost so. The atmosphere, the people, the story just grabs readers by the throats and takes them to a timeless moment on a beautiful but feral beach as two lovers watch a rare and ill-fated bird and contemplate their utterly doomed future. Highly recommended.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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