The Beacon by Susan Hill is a claustrophobic and suspenseful family drama which leaves you wondering what you believed in the tale. It tells of four siblings, Colin, May, Frank and Berenice who were born and bred at 'The Beacon', the house on the hill. Colin and Berenice marry but stay locally; May, tries being a student in the city but is drawn back to her home and stays to look after their ageing parents; but Frank - well he escapes. Life continues, father John dies and their mother Bertha grows more and more dependent on May. Then something happens which shocks the three sublings to their core - leaving them reeling in horror that Frank has written a memoir about his family and everyone else believes it to be the truth. (All this you can find out from the blurb.)

The writing is economical, and the structure of the story, starting at Bertha's death with frequent flashbacks, is such that you know something happened, but it builds up over half the book's length before you find out for sure what it was. Many other events then fall into place - but not all, for Hill is an author renowned for her playfulness with her readers. There is a degree of ambiguity that leaves you asking more questions than are answered, there are no easy happy endings for this family. ( )

Every time I write anything about Susan Hill I worry that I'm repeating myself. She's just a brilliant writer. Reading her books is like watching an artist create a picture brush stroke by brush stroke, sentence by sentence. She writes with great economy, achieving with ten words what some writers struggle to convey with fifty. The Beacon is about how isolated in themselves people can be, shaped by their memories, perceptions and expectations. Or at least that is how it seemed to me. Susan always leaves room for ambiguity. You are never quite sure who is the villain or the victim or even if it is ever quite that easy to believe things are ever so black and white. This might seem to be a very short novel but even after the last word has been read there is plenty to think about and to wonder about.
Review from:Badeynge. ( )

Reason for Reading: I have tried (and enjoy) the author's mystery series and wanted to try some of her fiction.

With a novella one can't say much about the plot without telling the whole story. So briefly. Set in the "North Country" of England a family of four children grew up in the fifties on a farm far from any neighbors but with a little village close enough by. After they've all grown, one of the boys leaves the area for good never to return. This book examines how that effects those left behind, while it examines their past and their present especially through the eyes of May, the eldest daughter.

Beautifully written in stark language. This is a desolate story full of atmosphere to match. It actually has a Gothic feel with the lonely farmhouse, named The Beacon, and the silence inside as it contains May and her dying mother, then May and her mother's body and finally May on her own. I enjoyed the process of reading this but as often happens with books so short I wanted more. I really wanted to know more about May, but I think that was the whole point of the story. Right from the beginning we are aware that their is a secret and then in my mind I felt as if their were two secrets and only one of them is revealed. The final ending has me stumped. I'm not sure I understand it all. Oh, I have some ideas and one that pervades is it tells the answer to the second secret but it's not what I suspected. I'll be thinking about this for a while.

Susan Hill fans will definitely want to read this, but if you haven't read the author before it's best not to start with this ambiguous story. ( )