Book review: Family secrets cannot hide forever within the walls of The Glass House

Rachel Donohue successfully builds atmosphere with a precise and intent writing style that also rounds out her characters brilliantly.

• The Glass House 
• Rachel Donohue
• Corvus, €18.00

Rachel Donohue’s The Glass House is at once a mystery, a love story, and an examination of family relationships. 

The narrative centres around two dramatic events that take place over 30 years apart in 1963 and 1999.

Richard Acklehurst is a famed political philosopher of the early 1960s, when the initial events of the novel are set. 

He dies during a winter storm on New Year’s Eve in 1963 in curious circumstances; his daughters — Aisling and Stella — and two of their friends are the only people in the house at the time.

Donohue’s tale jumps then to 1999, where Acklehurst’s body is defiled at the local cemetery, prompting long-held secrets to bubble to the surface. 

Aisling’s narrative takes us through the intervening years as herself, her sister, and their two friends Jonathan and Naoise each deal with the events of that night in 1963.

The novel is told through the experience of Acklehurst’s daughter Aisling. 

Herself and her sister Stella live with their father in The Glass House, following the death of their mother when they were infants.

“It is an unusual thing to have a notorious parent, your life is never completely your own. You exist only by extension, a shadow person, never quite finished.”

The house itself is like a separate character in the story. As its name suggests, it is made of glass — a modern, glass structure in the middle of the Galway countryside. 

One can see directly into the house and see what its inhabitants are doing, but the irony of Donohue’s tale lies in how events within the house were obfuscated and unknown.

In many ways, the house represents Ackelhurst, who on the surface appears a great thinker, a famed political philosopher of his time. 

He holds regular parties at the house, where people come from across Europe — subversive friends and acquaintances that we never quite meet.

He looms large on these occasions, oversees the parties like a conductor, positioning his daughters here and there, commanding Stella to dress a certain way and to perform.

But what are his real motivations? Who are these guests? What lies underneath that supposedly transparent surface?

In many ways, the house empowers Acklehurst, allowing him to behave in a certain way, untempered. But is he also a prisoner of the house?

“He didn’t look so large outside of the house, a diminished figure in tweed. Lost among a people that were not his own.”

During the 30-year story, secrets are revealed and kept hidden. 

Jonathan and Stella live in London, where Stella — perhaps the most affected by the events in The Glass House — teeters on the edge and Jonathan hovers in the background. 

Naoise goes to Dublin, settles down, and charts a successful career in law, while Aisling moves to Florence and lives on her own, keeping her distance from the other three but maintaining tabs on them from afar.

“I thought things could be forgotten, if you just hid them away.”

Donohue’s writing is full of beauty, bringing life to simple descriptions.

“She looked like she might be a smiling sort of person, a jolliness to her features, but somehow she had decided to retrain them.”

Every word has meaning and nothing is wasted. She builds atmosphere and emotion with her clever use of prose and her characters are fully rounded.

Within this beautifully written novel lies a dark heart but there is beauty and connection too.