AN UNEXPECTED GUEST by Anne Korkeakivi
“Review book provided by HarperCollins via Booksellers NZ”
For a blessedly short time I worked for this country's Foreign Affairs department, which included a two year stint in a foreign outpost. I thoroughly enjoyed my time aiding my country's foreign representation on foreign shores but realised fairly early on that I was not cut out for a life of protocol, being perfectly well behaved all the time, being impeccably dressed, thinking before I spoke, saying and doing as I was told. It was sort of like being a cardboard cut out for the country you came from. The further up the diplomatic ladder one climbed, the more, it seemed to me, Stepford-like people became. In particular the wives. Often not allowed to work in the countries they moved to, the wives had the children and saw them off to boarding school at a certain age, dealt with nannies, household staff, hosted cocktail parties and dinners for home country politicians or local dignitaries, attended such cocktail parties and dinners, played tennis when they could and to my young eyes, generally didn't seem the happiest of people. Sure they had a comfortable and privileged existence but I wonder how much of their real selves they left behind in the process.
So given the opportunity to read and review this book about such a woman I was very keen to see if my youthful prejudices still held sway in the nearly 30 years that have elapsed since my days in Foreign.
Slightly further up the food chain than I ever was, American-born Clare Moorhouse is married to Edward, a high-ranking British diplomat. He is in fact one lower than the British Ambassador in Paris. Now we all know that behind every successful man there is one very capable wife, and Clare has proven herself over the twenty or so years they have been married to be the perfect diplomat's wife. Intelligent, well educated, extremely attractive and beautifully presented, mother to two teenage boys (both at school in England), well organised, able to establish and disestablish a home every three years for a new city, discreet and charming, she is a career diplomat's wife and very good at it.
Over the course of 24 hours however, the facade that Clare has set up over the years develops a few cracks. It never crumbles but a slightly different woman goes to bed at the end of that 24 hours, a happier, more contented woman I might add.
The trouble begins one evening, shortly after the London bombings in 2005. The embassy and its staff are still on a high security alert, and everyone is just a bit edgy. Clare is given just on 24 hours notice, that due to the sudden illness of the Ambassador, she and Edward are required to host a very important dinner. If successful it would result in Edward being appointed to Ambassador in Dublin, a post he has always wanted. Clare herself is of Irish parentage, and has always felt herself to be as much Irish as American. However this possible move to Ireland opens some very firmly shut doors in her past.
While her mind is dealing with this, plus the short notice to put on a top-end formal dinner party, her younger son Jamie has been getting up to his own hi jinx at boarding school in England, and run away back to Paris. Not wanting to worry Edward she attempts to deal with this by herself, even to the point of hiding Jamie in the house so Edward does not get angry and thus distracted from the business at hand.
Going about her preparations the next morning for the dinner, Clare is troubled by her long-ago memories of Ireland and her involvement with an IRA terrorist, Niall. In the streets of Paris and the markets, beautifully depicted by the way, she keeps seeing images of this man, until later in the day he manifests himself. Believing all these years that he was dead, it is a huge relief that she isn't going mad, but he forces her to confront the reality of what really happened all those years ago in Ireland. At the same time as she is navigating around Paris she literally runs into a Turk. Their meeting and a subsequent assassination throws up a huge moral dilemma for her, that combined with her encounter with Niall and the troubles her son is having, enable her, just for a short time, to stop being Clare Moorehouse, perfect wife of high ranking career diplomat Edward, and becomes Clare Siobahn Fennelly again, her true self.
As a journey of self-discovery and personal redemption this is good writing. Clare is desperately trying to maintain a hold on her reality, the tightly controlled and managed life she has built up, and yet at the same time wrestling with doing the right thing. The author has lived the life of an expatriate, and in France too. Her love of Paris in springtime is very apparent; the city sounds gorgeous as do the markets, and the shops and the streets she is driven down. Having been a bit of an expat myself, she writes intelligently and realistically of such a life, particularly for women on whom the largest burden of such a life falls. Often they cannot work, they are there because of the husband's work, and it is up to them to set up the new household, sometimes every few years, sort out schooling, child care, shopping, build up social networks, deal with unknown and new health issues, culture shock and so on.
However I did find the minutiae of Clare's life incredibly dull, her superior abilities at managing her staff were patronising, no wonder her cook was so grumpy; her thought processes alarming - how anyone can spend so much time and mental energy analysing and re-analysing the events of years gone past with no conclusion I do not know. In terms of her moral dilemmas, the encounter with the Turk is I think the only truly significant thing that occurred and I did struggle with how an episode in the past where nothing bad actually happened to her could suddenly take on monumentally enormous implications. The teenage son business was just annoying - an overindulged spoilt mummy's boy who needed a dose of consequences for actions. Plus there was just a shade too much French dialogue, not always paraphrased into English; you would need a basic reading level of French to follow Clare's conversations with those around her. It does lend a certain 'Francais' to the story but if you can't read French simply a nuisance.
It troubles me a little that it would appear not much has changed for the wives of diplomats over the last thirty years, and that is was probably for the best for myself as well as my country that I did find employment in other areas!
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