posted on 15 Feb 2017

Deep Secret by Berlie Doherty

This is a book about the inevitability of change, the way we all tend to resist change happening in our lives and the personal secrets we always seem to gather around us on our journeys. Ultimately, despite being a book littered with tragedy, the changes we see here are not oppressive and threatening but a liberation that literally washes away the past

The plot of the book is superbly constructed and all the characters finely realised – even at the margins of the action. As we read a community is built up around us and we are drawn into the action as if we were living amongst them and sharing their daily lives. This is a small community and the reader finds themselves watching the complex networks of relationships as they grow and evolve. Although no specific date is ever mentioned for the story we witness, we do know that the author modelled her story on the true events surrounding the building of the Ladybower reservoir in North Derbyshire between 1935 and 1945.

When the book opens we are in the household of the extended Barnes family who have lived in the tiny village in this valley for generations. The teenage twins of Sim and Jenny Barnes, Madeleine and Grace, who will be the centre of the story, are vivacious and full of life. The two are virtually impossible to tell apart physically and temperamentally and they live for each other – literally. When Grace dies suddenly of an accidental drowning in a river, Madeleine in her grief and guilt  ‘becomes’ her, convincing everyone that it is Grace who is alive and Madeleine dead. This is the deepest of the deep secrets in the book and we see the consequences of this deception play itself out on the network of relationships, loves and infatuations that follow.

This is not the only secret that stalks the pages of this book – secret loves, secret guilt and even the secret of a still-born baby buried in the woods are part of the community’s heritage. This accretion of life and life’s secrets seems as if it will go on forever, unchanged as it has been for so many years. But the seeming solidity of this bucolic life is rudely disrupted when the village discovers that the land they farm and the house they rent have been purchased by the water board with the aim of flooding the valley to create a new reservoir. As a consequence the families are to be moved up the hill and into new build, modern houses and while at first the community resists the change, ultimately it is this change that is the healing force.

The book seems at first to be an exploration of loss and tragedy but in fact it becomes a celebration of letting go and moving on. It is a finely written, uplifting examination of the complexity and pain of human relationships and how people can move out of the shows cast by their secrets and into the light of a new world metaphorically cleansed by the waters of renewal.

Terry Potter

February 2017