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A review by illustrated_librarian
Private Rites by Julia Armfield
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
The world is ending, the rain won't stop and the water is rising inexorably higher. Daily life attempts to drag onward in a drowning city as people make do. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes are no different - end times don't get you out of navigating grief or pointless jobs or fraught sibling relationships, after all.
This one came to me at a strange time, resonating uncannily in several ways that made me glad I didn't pick it up during the wave of release hype but waited until the mood struck me. I also dove in not having read the blurb recently, and I think that's the best way.
Private Rites feels a little less focussed than Our Wives, more diffuse and blurry at the boundaries, but for a novel about watery dissolution I can't entirely hold that against it. I've read a few fictional predictions of where our insistence on ignoring climate breakdown leads and this felt the most real for being decidedly mundane - past, present, and future collapsed into a single point: the dull, neverending end, humanity straggling on as meaningless sirens sound, infrastructure collapses, and everyone continues going to work for some reason.
Armfield writes in such a butterfly-pinning way about the nuances of sisterhood, of womanhood, of the times we live in, that it was relatable to the point of pain. Her characters express nihilistic belief that there's no point in growing, in trying or hoping for anything at the end of the world and this runs parallel to the stifling nature of familial bonds; their uncanny ability to freeze a specific version of you in time like an insect in amber, a version you can spend your life fighting against or accept and regress into that role in their company.
For all that I loved the complex, contradictory sisterly relationships, this felt unbalanced to me overall. It gets a little soggy in the middle, bogged down in petty conflict and too light on the eerie. But it rallies at the end, bringing through a strand of uncanniness and leaving behind that soft, mournful feeling I now associate so strongly with Armfield's work. Blood is, she seems to say, just about thicker than water.
This one came to me at a strange time, resonating uncannily in several ways that made me glad I didn't pick it up during the wave of release hype but waited until the mood struck me. I also dove in not having read the blurb recently, and I think that's the best way.
Private Rites feels a little less focussed than Our Wives, more diffuse and blurry at the boundaries, but for a novel about watery dissolution I can't entirely hold that against it. I've read a few fictional predictions of where our insistence on ignoring climate breakdown leads and this felt the most real for being decidedly mundane - past, present, and future collapsed into a single point: the dull, neverending end, humanity straggling on as meaningless sirens sound, infrastructure collapses, and everyone continues going to work for some reason.
Armfield writes in such a butterfly-pinning way about the nuances of sisterhood, of womanhood, of the times we live in, that it was relatable to the point of pain. Her characters express nihilistic belief that there's no point in growing, in trying or hoping for anything at the end of the world and this runs parallel to the stifling nature of familial bonds; their uncanny ability to freeze a specific version of you in time like an insect in amber, a version you can spend your life fighting against or accept and regress into that role in their company.
For all that I loved the complex, contradictory sisterly relationships, this felt unbalanced to me overall. It gets a little soggy in the middle, bogged down in petty conflict and too light on the eerie. But it rallies at the end, bringing through a strand of uncanniness and leaving behind that soft, mournful feeling I now associate so strongly with Armfield's work. Blood is, she seems to say, just about thicker than water.