IF ever there was a recipe for giving away too much information, it's the device that frames "The Rain Before It Falls," Jonathan Coe's new novel, spanning several generations of difficult Englishwomen in the second half of the 20th century.
Just before she dies, Rosamond, a Shropshire retiree in her early 70s, leaves a set of recorded cassette tapes and 20 family photographs, hoping that her niece and executor, Gill, will send them on to Imogen, a beloved relative who was blinded as a child and whom Rosamond lost track of years ago. When Imogen can't be found, Gill settles in to listen to the old woman's taped account -- based on minute descriptions of each photo in the context of its time and place -- of a devastating history of willful damage and malign neglect passed down through the female line.
The novel's frame -- which was likely inspired by similar circumstances surrounding the death of the writer B.S. Johnson, of whom Coe wrote an admiring biography -- is neither far-fetched nor especially new (it's a favorite movie trick for tracking back and forth in time), but here it lends itself to an efflorescence of description and explanation that overwhelms Coe's spare, precise prose. Laced with small but regular explosions of melodrama, "The Rain Before It Falls" is a surprisingly earnest departure from the biting sociopolitical commentary that won Coe acclaim for his postmodern satires of Britain in the 1970s ("The Rotters' Club") and '80s ("What a Carve Up!").
For all Rosamund's uncloseted lesbianism in an era inhospitable to homosexuality -- and a florid early crush on Jennifer Jones (in a rare flash of situation comedy, she finds herself standing mute next to the actress on the Shropshire set of "Gone to Earth," a steamy potboiler by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, no strangers to female-driven melodrama) -- this respectable publisher admits having "hardly been one of nature's rebels or mavericks." Despite her attraction to headstrong women, it's an understatement; you can practically feel her holding her nose at the advance of modernity.
Evacuated during World War II from a Birmingham suburb to live with horsy relatives on a Shropshire farm, Rosamond came under the influence of her older cousin Beatrix, the high-strung daughter of Ivy, an alternately indifferent and abusive mother. Beatrix passes this maternal insufficiency on to her own daughter, Thea, a similarly unhinged baggage, whose inattention to her daughter, Imogen, results in the child losing her sight at the tender age of 3.
