The View from Here

Deborah McKinlay
Soho Press (2011)
ISBN 9781569478714
Reviewed by Olivera Baumgartner-Jackson for Reader Views (2/11) 


Deborah McKinlay’s “The View from Here” was an interesting and much more complex book than I would have thought it to be after reading the synopsis on the back cover.

Frances and Phillip have been married for over two decades, when her rather charmed life comes to an abrupt halt. Not only is she diagnosed with an illness that’s likely to end her life shortly, but she also discovers that her husband has been having an affair. She decides that she needs to know for sure, so she follows him to London and from afar witnesses his meeting with Josee, his lover. Surprisingly enough, although it is clear that there is a lot of emotions and tenderness going on between those two, they do not end up going to her flat together, but instead they part and Phillip heads back to the countryside to be with his gravely ill wife. So Frances is left with a difficult decision of how and when, if at all, she should confront her husband. After all, although he has clearly betrayed her trust, it is also very clear that he does love her and intends to be with her until the end.

Quite a bit less surprisingly those events make Frances revisit the affair she was involved in while living in Mexico, trying to make a living teaching English. There she met three rich couples, who invited her to their luxurious rented villa. Mason and Sally, Richard and Patsy and Ned and Bee Bee were rich, spoiled and utterly indulgent Americans. It did not take long for the young Frances to get seriously entangled in an affair with Mason, and enchanted enough to pretty much choose to remain blind to the fact that he was obviously having an affair with Patsy as well. Instead of facing this truth, Frances conveniently decided to think of Mason’s wife, Sally, as the villain of their convoluted story.

Both parts of the story will come to rather surprising and unconventional ends, and the parallels drawn between the two affairs, the one where Frances was the lover, and the latest one, where she’s the wronged wife, will make the reader think long and hard about karma, and whether doing good might pay off some cosmic debt from our earlier life.

While I’ve enjoyed reading this book, I have found myself strangely unaffected by every single protagonist. I simply found them all, Frances and Phillip included, not very likeable and difficult to relate to. Ms. McKinlay’s prose is elaborate, but I found her writing difficult to read at times, and the structure of sentences was often quite confusing. In spite of that, I would recommend “The View from Here” to readers who do not mind a bit darker stories and who do not shy away from less than perfect heroes and heroines. This book offers no easy answers, but will decidedly satisfy anybody willing to search for the truth.

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