A review by bronzeageh
Private Rites by Julia Armfield

dark emotional mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

5.0

“sometimes I think hope is a far less satisfying feeling than despair”

A poignant, eerie, and stunning examination of the painful realities of family relationships shaped by childhood trauma in both devastating moments and the monotony of daily life. Atmospheric and intimate - I felt swallowed into this book immediately. 

Glaringly apparent from the first page was the key theme of climate crisis. A dystopian soggy nightmare - Armfield has a knack for describing the horror that can be found in water and wetness that I have never come across in anyone else’s writing. While sometimes it felt like simple foreshadowing, most often it was a strange and eerie world-building technique that put me on edge in a way I didn’t know that rain could. (If you haven’t read “Our Wives Under the Sea” - this water-horror was a very prominent area of that book too!)

The difficulties between each of the family relationships, and how Armfield revealed more piece by piece throughout the book, was skilfully and beautifully handled. Each sister’s section felt like a pass-the-parcel chest-aching delight and pain. One of the things we can forget about horror is that it comes from (at its core) the normal stuff in life.

I particularly loved the queer found-family driving the plot alongside the biological family dynamics and how they intermingled and ultimately influenced each other and the choices of the sisters. They struggled to learn from each other, but found lessons learnt in those they chose to surround themselves with.

Other key themes that I found fascinating included:
  • silence
  • juxtapositions
  • control
  • guilt and shame
  • knowledge and memory
The way each of these interacted with the ideas of family and climate crisis were incredibly interesting and I feel like I could write hundreds of essays on this book. It will definitely haunt me in its own ways for months after putting it down.

The main takeaway for me was: we can’t be so desperate to deal with how we feel in the present and our memories of the past that we forget our impact on the future.
 
So much confusion was generated at the end I had to re-read the section a couple of times to grasp that it was just all hell breaking loose with the house and the creepy cult people and that there wasn’t extra plot that I had missed. I desperately want to know what was actually happening with the mums and the dad and the exact reason behind all the rituals or the drawings around the house but (just like ‘Our Wives Under the Sea’) the audience isn’t privy to a full plot, we are only allowed access to brief glimpses alongside the incredible character analysis. While with other authors I might be angry to not have a full reveal, with Armfield’s writing I would never be so rude as to ask for more than what I’m given.
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