Review: We think we know the characters in 'After the Funeral,' but then the focus shifts

"It was never going to be the ordinary kind of wedding," says Janey in the opening line of a story from Tessa Hadley's "After the Funeral." "My mother didn't do anything ordinary."

Janey is 17 when her mother makes plans to remarry. Events include an outdoor, summer solstice ceremony on the family farm, homemade mead drunk from a special cup and a naked dip in the pond at sunset.

Janey approves of Patrick, her mother's intellectual husband-to-be.

"I loved talking with someone who had read things in books, instead of having experiences," she gushes. The first problem of the big day arises when Janey's half-sister declares her love for Patrick, then topples out of a high window. The second occurs when Janey decides she wants Patrick for herself and asks him to marry her instead.

"Wedding" is a short yet substantial story in Hadley's latest collection. Like most of the English writer's fiction, the focus is on family and relationships, the fault lines that course through supposedly happy unions and the hidden agendas that lurk behind seemingly happy facades. All 12 stories that make up "After the Funeral" are the work of a singular talent.

That talent is on full display when Hadley deftly switches the perspectives of her characters. "Dido's Lament" follows Lynette as she bumps into ex-husband Toby on the London underground and then goes back to his house to see where he has ended up. When she leaves, the story slides onto a parallel narrative track by shifting to Toby's somewhat jaundiced frame of mind. We learn that he only showed her his home so she could see that "he'd managed to have a life without her."

Hadley performs the same trick in "The Bunty Club." Three sisters are reunited in their childhood home when their elderly mother is taken to a hospital. Rotating their viewpoints, Hadley moves from bookish Pippa to practical Gillian to touchy Serena to reveal their markedly different outlooks. Elsewhere, "Mia" finds Hadley intrigued by narrative tropes, namely the juxtaposition between brains and beauty as one dowdy, intelligent woman strives to become "glamorous, fatal, unattainable."

Some of the strongest stories deal with altered mind-sets. In one, a teenager on vacation in Italy awakens from the spell cast by her parents and "their burdens of expectation." As her eyes open, the scales fall from them. Emotions also run high in Hadley's final story, "Coda," a tale of obsession during lockdown in an "unfashionable seaside town."

These are captivating stories, rich in character and fine-grained detail. Hadley's elegant prose is memorably descriptive: "Sadness made its claim on them now, winding through all the daily clutter like a cool long note played on a flute." Once again, Hadley entertains while offering shrewd, subtle insights into how we tick and the ties that bind us.

Malcolm Forbes has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist and the Wall Street Journal. He'll review Jamel Brinkley's "Witness" next month. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

After the Funeral and Other Stories

By: Tess Hadley

Publisher: Knopf, 240 pages, $28.