Private Rites by Julia Armfield: Review by Niall Harrison

Private Rites, Julia Armfield (Fourth Estate 978-0-00-860803-3, £16.99, 208pp, hc) June 2024. (Flatiron 978-1-250-59376-611-5, $27.99, 304pp, hc) December 2024.

I don’t know what the weather has been like this year where you live, but in the UK it has been wet. As I write in October, I think we are just about to exceed the 1991-2020 average for annual rainfall; in September, Southern Eng­land saw 233% of that average. Such statistics are a long-term consequence of climate change for the UK – warmer air is capable of holding more water. But more immediately, it has felt almost unbearably metaphorical, the grey dreariness of the weather matched to the grey dreariness of the state of the nation, somehow in stasis and decline at the same time, within a wider context of slow-motion global catastrophe. This is the mood that Julia Armfield’s new novel captures with painful clarity, and the Ballardian mechanism by which it does so. In the vivid near-future Britain of Private Rites, after ‘‘a decade of this, another decade before that of almost this’’, it rains so near-constantly that the breaks feel like glitches, and yet the mundane day-to-day ‘‘of work and sleep and lottery tickets, of yoga challenges, of buying fruit and paying taxes’’ continues. At the same time, the social fabric of the country has been worn thin, the welfare state nearly washed away, more and more people living ‘‘wherever and however they can’’. It is a society spiralling in ‘‘endless ending’’, an entropic flux. ‘‘Best not to recollect,’’ we are told, ‘‘that once there were any number of options and now there are fewer’’.

All of this is the voice of the novel speaking, in occasional sections headed CITY (almost certainly London), providing an essential wide-angle lens on the nature of this Britain. When CITY isn’t speaking, we’re immersed in it, riding shotgun with one of the three Carmichael sisters as they attempt to come to terms with the death of their father, an architect whose designs were praised for their ability to provide sanctuary, or more bluntly, places that allowed their wealthy in­habitants to ‘‘turn inward and forget’’. Eldest sister Isla, mid-thirties – just old enough to remember when rain was frequent but not constant – is the responsible one, a therapist. Her wife, Morven, left a few months ago, worried about wasting life in the end times. Middle sister Irene, a year junior, used to be a political firebrand but is set­tling into conventionality with her partner, Jude, who works in social housing provision. And the youngest is their half-sister Agnes, in her messy horny twenties, working as a barista and falling into a relationship with a customer, Stephanie. In the first half of the novel, they learn of their father’s death, and the nature of their inheritance; in the second half of the novel, they deal with that knowledge. Irene, you feel, is the lynchpin of the trio, most conscious of the sibling dynamic that Armfield captures with almost too much preci­sion, the feeling ‘‘not so much of being misun­derstood as of being understood too well at one time and then never again.’’ It is Irene who jokes that the Carmichaels are ‘‘King Lear and his dyke daughters’’, who seems to best recognise the nature of the story they are in.

These entangled and intense personal relation­ships – and the watery ambience – are familiar from Armfield’s first novel, Our Wives Under the Sea (2022), but where that novel confined itself al­most to a single apartment, with the world beyond oppressive but amorphous, Private Rites uses a broader canvas to good effect. The omnipresent rain cannot be understood as meteorologically plausible, but Armfield’s extrapolation is socially and psychologically thorough, from a mention of Irene logging on to a forum where people role-play normality (i.e. society before the rain), to the class guilt of minimising your trauma because others have it worse, to the reversal of the indoor smoking ban (because it’s not as though people can smoke outdoors any more), and an ominous mention of ‘‘archaic practices resurfacing the way trends will, exorcisms like bootcut jeans’’. All these are ways of seeking control and release in a world that has too little of either. The infrastructure, too, is mapped out in some detail – the commute via boat, the descriptions of houses built to rise or float with tides, the general sense of a city ‘‘first throwing itself into resistance, then management, then damage control.’’ My point is that although the near future won’t actually be like this, it could well feel like this – at times it already does – and that Armfield’s sharp and sensory prose ensures we feel every beat with her characters.

Private Rites is a book about people being shaped: by the ‘‘natural’’ and ‘‘artificial’’ environ­ments around them, by their families, by their histories. It is about three sisters ‘‘trying to be less conclusively the product of their past’’ in a society absolutely failing to achieve the same. It is about endings, the death of an individual and the death of a society, and in the end the risk of the death of imagination: if everything is running down, if damp capitalist realism is the entire horizon, what might it take to break that frame, to force a change? Particularly in its latter stages, the novel it reminded me of most strongly was Gwyneth Jones’s great Kairos (1988): I think both are excep­tional textured captures of political imagination at a point in time through the experiences of specific individuals, and their endings, audacious in each case, make a fascinating pair. I’m not certain that the ending of Private Rites is intended as political metaphor, but it certainly works as one, bleakly: it suggests that the only levers individual humans can still pull to effect change might end up making things worse, rather than better. Which leads to my final point. Private Rites was published in the UK in June 2024, one month before the end of a long period of Conservative government, and I struggle to think of a more powerful exploration of the psychic legacy of the last fourteen years. That means it’s a dark novel, but I hope I haven’t made it sound too much like homework: it hyp­notised me almost from page one.

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This review and more like it in the January 2025 issue of Locus.

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