Lisa St. Aubin de Terán

This book caught me off-guard since I knew nothing about the author, but love travel books and travel by train in particular. It is part-memoir, part-reveries about train travel and the seemingly hundreds of places that Lisa has visited. She jumps around, from England to Venezuela to Italy to Scotland, throwing in Russia and Argentina and several other countries, but writes with passion and paranoia and profound insight into the psychology of people; she also knows her botany, rambling off show more garden plant names casually, which always impresses me. Reading this book made me visit Wikipedia to get a fuller understanding of her life, her many loves and homes, in a more comprehendible chronology. But someone who cherishes (and lugs around) favorite old suitcases, and who wears Edwardian dresses when she travels by train, is someone I would like to read more about. I highly recommend this book and her other memoirs. show less

‘His gut was telling him he had stumbled on a crime that had something to do with little girls.’

When local police visit an elderly peeping tom, the confiscated photographs of multiple young girls are sent by an intuitive PC Carey to an even more intuitive DI Custer, of the recently formed Paedophile Unit, to investigate. The girls are fully clothed, often posed outside a cinema, but PC Carey feels that something is amiss. After having his attention snagged by a simple photograph of a show more young girl in a bleak room, sitting on a bed and gazing straight at the camera with beseeching eyes, DI Custer is convinced, too – so convinced that he will devote the next three years of his life to solving what will turn out to be a series of sex crimes, murders and hidden graves.

— What’s it about? —

In essence, St Aubin de Teran’s focus is on the psychological make-up of the various criminals and their pursuers, DI Custer and Sergeant Jolly Campbell. This isn’t a who-dunnit or a how-dunnit; as the novel continues, the machinations deployed by the paedophiles are clearly outlined, almost gloried in, due to Aubin’s decision to share not just the full biographical history, but the thoughts and feelings of the murderers themselves.

As the story develops, the reader will find themselves waiting eagerly for Custer and Jolly to apprehend all the villains through a combination of investigative police work, ‘unorthodox’ (illegal) approaches from Custer, for whom the ends justify the means (though not in a corrupt manner, merely ignoring correct procedures), and sheer relentless determination. Finally, Custer and Jolly go undercover, placing themselves at increasing risk from a villain who will do anything to cover his tracks.

— What’s it like? —

The first 150 pages introduce all the main characters, giving each one a fully fleshed out backstory and establishing the events in their lives that made them who they are in the contemporary world of the narrative (which is actually the 1980s) while also establishing the seed of the investigation: despite the dismissal of his colleagues and senior officers, Custer is determined to root out the crime he is certain has been hinted at by the photo.

This depiction of the villains made for rather uncomfortable reading at points, as the perpetrators casually and deliberately commit strings of abuses throughout their lives, using each other’s predilections to further their own disturbing goals, and the third person narration slips into their own language. For instance, at a key point in the narrative, a paedophile ‘despatched his child lover with a fond kiss and a bus fare’. One imagines that Custer, and most readers, would surely use the term ‘child victim’ and argue that ‘inappropriate’ would be more accurate than ‘fond’.

The pace quickens towards the final quarter of the book, where Custer and Jolly are undercover and there is a tangible sense of the net tightening. Will Custer achieve redemption? And will he confess his feelings to Jolly? The latter relationship adds a necessary warmth to the book by gently hinting at the possibility of a mature, healthy relationship, in sharp contrast to the surrounding paedophile conspiracy.

— Final thoughts —

I found some of St Aubin de Teran’s choices surprising: Jolly’s sympathy towards one of the elderly villains is perhaps partially simply reflective of real life (Jolly worries that, if a case came to trial, a jury may fail to believe in his crimes when faced with his frail and pathetic demeanour, or at least fail to punish him for them) but a visit she pays later in the book suggests she also has real sympathy towards a man who cannot be conceived of as an innocent.

Similarly, St Aubin de Teran’s decision to present the paedophiles as full humans with positive qualities as well as obvious negative ones humanises them in a way some readers may find uncomfortable – but there again, it is a rare human who has no redeeming qualities. If we believe all paedophiles are obvious villains, our naivety will not reward us!

This is a character focused novel that gains urgency in the final pages and creates a largely effective closure. Two key characters are missing in the final pages, but I can understand the omission and enjoyed the reflective final pages, which capture Custer as he prepares for the future.

With the obvious caveat that this may be a difficult read for those who have experienced or been affected by the issues portrayed in the story, I found this an interesting (and sometimes horrifying*) read.

Many thanks to Amaurea Press for providing me with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

*I looked up PIE, the Paedophile Information Exchange, and couldn’t quite believe that it was real. *shudders* show less

Comparable to Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Lisa St. Aubin de Terán's short novel Keepers of the House will appeal to those who enjoy South American literature, with the additional benefit that nothing can have been lost in translation: St. Aubin de Terán is an Englishwoman who married a Venezuelan man and lived in the country for seven years in the Seventies. Keepers of the House is a strongly-autobiographical fictionalization of her situation there.

We follow show more Lydia, a young Englishwoman who marries a Venezuelan landowner and settles into his estate in the Andes. Her situation is the framework for a series of six episodic chapters (essentially short stories) which detail the fortunes of some the generations of the noble Beltrán family. Each of these family stories are told to Lydia by a lifelong family servant named Benito Mendoza (the book is dedicated to a man of the same name) and there is a slightly weak attempt to stitch these stories together to portray a greater literary arc, that of "the last of the families of the first conquistadores [who] were in their decline" (pg. 65), and, by extension, the country of Venezuela itself.

However, the comparison to Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, while useful as shorthand for a review, also betrays some of the book's faults. It is hard to differentiate St. Aubin de Terán's Venezuela from Márquez's Colombia, and I know as much about Venezuela now as I did when I opened the book: not much at all, regrettably. "Our [family] history is like the history of a whole country," Benito says to Lydia on page 26, making the comparisons to Márquez's Buendía family all the more overt, but, aside from one passage towards the very end (corrupt governments "tyrannized the country's economy with their transitory oil" (pg. 206)), I did not get any focused sense of Venezuelan society or Andean culture. St. Aubin de Terán's tracing is obscure; we're going through the literary motions as we read, but there's not much that moves.

That said, Keepers of the House is always a worthwhile read. The writing is very capable and the characters are well-drawn, though it was sometimes hard to follow the through-line of the story. After a slow and unfocused start (to the point where choosing to read it begins to seem like a mistake), the novel picks up around Chapter Two. The decision to move from one generation to another keeps things fresh, and the shortness of the book means it doesn't sag like Márquez's more vaunted novel sometimes could. You have to tackle each chapter separately, resetting on characters and plot at the end of each one before going again, but once you realise this is how you have to approach it, the book becomes much more enjoyable.

It's a dark and brutal novel at times, filled with unloved spinsters and widows, destitute peasants, a village massacre and an involuntary amputation, but I was pleased to be surprised at some of the interesting directions the book took me into. If, at the end, I still hadn't grown to love it, I had been charmed by it. Its literary depth may remain elusive, but if Keepers of the House is ultimately a more approachable facsimile of Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, there's certainly worse things for a novel to be. But to truly explore Venezuela, the Land of Grace, in fiction, I'll have to look elsewhere. show less

This is a fascinating memoir by Lisa St Aubin deTeran of six or seven years while she was living on a Hacienda in Venezuela. She was only 17 years of age when she married Jaime Teran and moved to the Venezuelan Andes. Jaime, it turns out, is unpredictable and unreliable. He is hardly there and when he is he is often violent. Lisa writes about this in her own style that is not packed with drama but more full of the every day details of life on the hacienda. She is left to run the whole estate show more and with no support from her husband and only limited support from his parents she leans on la gente, the workers on the hacienda. I was gripped as she wrote about having a baby, against the odds, her mother's visits, being ill, the noise and activity of the sugar cane production, the loyal but dangerous turkey and her friends. There is plenty of loneliness here but she doesn't dwell on it and the book is all the more powerful for that. A marvellous and illuminating read of life in a rural corner of Venezuela in the 1970s. show less