“All families have secrets.” As an opening line to a chapter, it’s dynamite – and devastatingly true. We all experience secrets, as well as little lies and betrayals, passed across the generations.
However, not many families, it has to be said, have to deal with troubled students falling off the roof of King's College chapel in Cambridge. But the dramatic centre of Salley Vickers's new novel, Cousins, has already struck enough of a chord with her eager readers that people are approaching her with their own closely-guarded feelings and discoveries.
“How the non-disclosure of the past affects the present is clearly something people are really interested in,” says the 68-year-old English novelist, with a laugh. “Trauma passed down from generation to generation is kind of haunting.”
As a trained psychotherapist, you might expect Vickers to be interested in the way the problems of the past reveal themselves in the present.
Indeed, her remarkable 2006 novel, The Other Side of You, takes place during a seven-hour session between a doctor and patient, while Violet in 2009's Dancing Backwards is effectively trying to right the mistakes she made as a youngster. As Vickers says, all of her 10 books to date are really about "what gives life meaning. It's more than the material world; we find it in love for other people, art, nature, God … and my characters are often trying to comes to terms with that".
Still, in Cousins, her personal and professional lives dovetail more overtly than previously. A fictional memoir of a family history, which emerges as a result of a terrible accident that befalls Will Tye when he falls from the roof of the chapel, is told from the perspectives of Will's grandmother, Betty, his younger sister, Hetta, and his aunt, Bell, the mother of the young woman with whom he is in love.
None of the gently revealed secrets and lies in this broodingly quiet, but deeply perceptive, novel relate exactly to Vickers’s own experience – it is the “complicated web of family life” she is interested in.
“I did quite a lot of work with people who were the children of Holocaust survivors, so reflected tragedy is something I’ve always been fascinated by,” she says.
“When my mother was young, she was the victim of a German bombing raid during the Second World War in Cambridge. The only one that dropped on a civilian house was where she lived, and the man she was with at the time was killed. She thought she was going to die, too. Her legs were burnt off, and she was always told she wouldn’t be able to have children.
“She finally managed to have me and, later in life, I still felt that I was caught up in that drama. So yes, there was very much a personal angle to this book, whereas my others have never been remotely autobiographical.”
The bombing is retold in a smaller way in Cousins, and the novel derives great power from such realism: even the roof-climbing is taken from an real cult book, The Night Climbers of Cambridge. And when Will's cousin, Cele, goes to see a psychologist, he scorns her for being naive. Was she having a little knowing nod at her previous career?
“It would be very unrealistic to say psychotherapy works for everybody,” says Vickers.
“I very much tried to maintain a healthy scepticism, but it’s true to character for Will to mock Cele because he is anxious himself about what looking inside might reveal.”
For Vickers, the value of psychotherapy is in its capacity to heal through telling the truth – and Cousins is certainly a book that explores this idea without resorting to elongated scenes in quiet consulting rooms.
Instead, it is a “family drama about all families”, and the psychotherapy reveals itself when “covered-up things get uncovered, and in the uncovering new life and meaning emerges”.
And, to take her interest in therapy one step further, Vickers is certain that, much like her journey from psychotherapist to novelist, literary fiction itself can also provide reassurance and succour.
“I think a good book provides an understanding of people’s complicated lives and feelings in a way another person very rarely can,” she says.
“The greatest compliment I get as an author is when people feel understood when they read my books.
“That’s why I think fiction is therapeutic: you might be of a different race, nationality, gender… but books build a sense of communal understanding that might otherwise be missing. We learn bits about ourselves that perhaps we haven’t recognised until we confront them or meet them in a fictional character. It’s a wonderful medium.”
• Cousins is out now
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