Our Picnics in the Sun by Morag Joss

Published by Delacorte Press/Random House on November 26, 2013

A bursting blood vessel in Howard Morgan's head and his wife's fall from a ladder set the stage in Our Picnics in the Sun, Morag Joss' story of an aging couple in South West England. The action resumes three years later. Point of view shifts between Howard, who struggles with speech and mobility, and Deborah, who is neglecting their sheep and barely tending to Stoneyridge, their decaying bed-and-breakfast. We also see Howard and Deborah from the point of view of Adam, their 28-year-old son working abroad, who is determined to avoid them as much as he can. An unexpected guest named Theo seeks accommodation at Stoneyridge on Adam's birthday and eventually insinuates himself into the Morgan family drama, sparking changes in the attitudes and interactions of the Morgan clan while forcing Deborah (and, indirectly, Howard) to confront the feelings they have kept hidden from each other, and possibly from themselves, since Adam's birth.

Our Picnics in the Sun is about the essential role that kind treatment of our children and parents and spouses plays in a healthy existence. But the novel also helps us understand why kindness so easily disappears, why we sometimes struggle to bestow it upon the people we love. Neither Howard nor Deborah are ideal parents or spouses, and Adam is less than an ideal son, but it is easy to feel sympathy for all of them. Howard, a controlling twit who has devoted much of his self-absorbed spiritualistic life to bearing a well-deserved sense of guilt, is now a mind trapped in a dysfunctional body, incapable of articulating his thoughts, often experiencing inexpressible hunger and cold, regretting all the years that he refused to notice Deborah "fading and slipping away from him." While it is tempting to judge Deborah for the uncaring care she gives (or withholds from) Howard, she has limitations of her own -- she can only "breathe freely" when she's away from Howard -- and it isn't her fault that her anger and frustration is not alleviated by Howard's helplessness. Adam, impoverished and home-schooled to the point of ignorance as a child, deprived of everything he wanted (including a feeling of normalcy), can't abide a return to the source of so many unwelcome memories. Deborah lives in denial of Adam's detachment from the family, convincing herself each year that Adam will appear for his birthday picnic on the moor, a ritual he dreaded as a boy.

Flashbacks to Adam's significant birthdays furnish the links that allow the reader to see the chain of the Morgan family history, including the oddly obsessive birthday picnics. Late in the novel we learn some things that force a reinterpretation of Howard and Deborah and that shed light upon the annual pilgrimages to the moor. A jolt in the last pages helps make new sense of much of what came before.

Is it too late for the Morgans to recapture the sense of kindness that has been missing from their lives for so long? The answer is moving and surprising and insightful. This is a deft piece of storytelling by a writer with a compassionate understanding of human nature who is in firm control of her compelling characters.

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