Susan Hill - The Beacon

Review by showhost 8th Oct 2009
I just didn’t get it! Even the ending I didn’t get!

So, its about a family who live in a desolate, North Country, farmhouse, called The Beacon, which had belonged to their grandparents and probably those before them, generations of family having lived and reared their children there.

The story is mainly about May Prime. At the beginning of the story May is living with her ailing mother at the farmhouse. Her father had died years previously, her brother Colin had moved on and got married, her sister Berenice had also moved on and got married, the youngest child, her brother Frank had married and lived in London but they don’t talk about him.

The farmhouse wasn’t a working farm anymore as when her father passed away there was no-one to oversee the running of it so eventually, the animals went and the labour force moved on.

May, herself, had moved once – she was a clever girl. She had passed her school/college exams with ease then went to study at a university in London. But May wasn’t a very sociable person, she was alone a lot, she didn’t like the ‘halls of residence’. Then the terrors began, she began to see things to imagine a stream of traffic as a ‘thunderous army menacing her and the people walking past as hostile enemies with staring eyes…’ Or ‘woke in the middle of the night convinced that large ants were crawling over her body and eating the skin away’. On the day of the end of year exams May got up and walked out of the hall and walked back home to The Beacon. Her mother, Bertha, had been right all along, May was not fit to be away. From that day on, until he died, she would spend most of her days with her father working on the farm. The terrors never followed her back home.

Out of the blue, years later and after their fathers death, Frank devastated the family when he wrote a supposedly, biographical book ‘The Cupboard Under the Stairs’. The book claimed that Frank was beaten, abused and locked in a cupboard and blamed all his family for having inflicted these atrocities on him. Overnight Frank found fame and fortune, the rest of the family were shunned by society.

May, Colin & Berenice didn't contact Frank or challenge him about the book, they thought it would run its course and people would forget. They knew it wasn’t true that it was all fabricated and they assumed that people would realize that, especially the people who knew them, but they didn’t.

On the death of their mother, Frank turns up at the farmhouse for the funeral. Although the mother was still alive when the book came out the other siblings didn’t tell her about it. Who inherits the farmhouse, will they all fight then make up, will May move on, will they speak to Frank, was it all true in the book, who knows....?


‘Subtle & profoundly moving’ ‘beautiful & evocative’ ‘authentically chilling’ ‘magnificently eerie’. These were some of the quotes on the back of the book, I am afraid to say I didn’t feel any of these emotions.

Funny how I had thought the Lionel Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin)book really hard going at times but this I thought, maybe in comparison, maybe because I read it straight after ‘Kevin..’ was too easy, there was nothing really going on. Not my style of book at all.