I thought of the baby, Paul, my half brother, swaddled in an incubator, and I tried to think of Francesca sitting beside him, waiting—but it was impossible to imagine her in such a place.

The High House - Harvard Review

and for a moment there was a gap in her fury, and she looked neither fierce nor righteous but only rather sad—as though she could see already how far she had failed, and wished only that the end would come, and let us all out. Unlike other postapocalyptic tales, plot is secondary to the emotional weight borne by the characters who know the end is coming, and to the harrowing glimpses of the future. Even Carys Bray’s ostensibly more conservative When the Lights Go Out uses the backdrop of a dying world to explore the particulars of a declining marriage, while Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind (although not strictly cli-fi) did something interesting with the classic disaster novel trope by creating a post-apocalyptic chiller comedy-of-manners hybrid.

We went to the high house at Christmas too, when some years snow lay on the beach and ice washed in gray sheets down the river, and other years the grass still grew and the leaves had barely turned on their branches. I had no plans, either for the afternoon or for the time beyond it—my life, which stretched empty ahead. When I was tired of being by myself, I came in from the garden and trailed after him, nagging to be taken somewhere.

The High House by Jessie Greengrass | Book review | The TLS The High House by Jessie Greengrass | Book review | The TLS

He sat in the old armchair by the French doors, reading, or he stood at the kitchen counter, chopping vegetables to make lunch. In fact, as an artist in any medium it can feel self-indulgent, in 2021, to be making work about anything else.Father followed her about as she went from room to room, collecting jumpers, chargers, a toothbrush. We ran east into the tail end of the morning and then into the afternoon, rattling through the outskirts of the city, through its hinterland to what lay beyond, a succession of small towns with bunting strung across their streets giving out to fields, to woods, to the curve of a river and children standing on a white-painted bridge, a village with a fête, a farm with horses. Before posting, each Tripadvisor review goes through an automated tracking system, which collects information, answering the following questions: how, what, where and when. Her voice, recorded and reproduced, sounded odd, not unfamiliar but not quite right, as though she were doing an impression of herself.

The High House | Book by Jessie Greengrass | Official The High House | Book by Jessie Greengrass | Official

We are delighted to celebrate these 20 brilliant books as we mark a milestone 50th anniversary year,” said Jill McDonald, chief executive of prize sponsor Costa Coffee. Often, in the night, I wonder how it must have been for them in the last moments, Francesca and father—whether it was slow or quick, a death by falling or one by crushing or by drowning. She had come out to meet me from the house, and when she reached me she lifted Pauly from my back, gently so she didn’t wake him, and then she was walking on ahead of me, and I was following her, back through the garden, into the house—and that is how we came here, and we have never left. Pauly, his face pink, his breath even, was draped across her lap, and I sat with them, doing my homework on the floor at the end of the bed until Pauly woke, and then Francesca and I played games with him, stacking towers of wooden blocks for him to knock into a heap, pushing toy cars so that their wheels rattled across the floorboards. I missed father, but I didn’t miss the way I had to make myself seem happy for him, and I missed Francesca too, but not the feeling she brought into a room that we were all failing against standards that were impossible to match, and not the fear she also brought, the constant awareness of consequences that she would let us neither forget nor ignore.If I thought about it at all then, I think that I assumed they must be resting when they went to the high house. This is the absurdity of it—that I couldn’t forgive Francesca because she chose the world over Pauly, and now I can’t forgive myself because I didn’t. Greengrass isn’t adding to the more sensationalist offerings in the eco-dystopia vein; her interest lies in the relationships between her characters, and how they came to survive in the first place. The teachers were kind to me, carefully treating me the same as the real parents—and although the effort showed, I appreciated their making it. Unquestionably the most intriguing character here, she is portrayed as an enigma, described only through the eyes of others – a risky gamble that doesn’t quite pay off.