I just finished the first volume of Susan Howatch's The Wheel of Fortune (It has nothing to do with the game show, but rather a notion of the philosopher Boethius). It's the tenth book of Howatch's I've read, after the six Starbridge books, the two healing centre books and Sins of the Fathers.

Published in 1984, prior to the Starbridge series, The Wheel of Fortune has many of the element that made the Starbridge books so great: psychologically complex characters so full of self-delusion they make bad choices, yet once you understand how they tick, you can't help but root for them and hope they can sort out their messes.

The focus of this novel is a wealthy Welsh/English landowning family. They're struggling with the aftermath of scandal and downright evil in the grandparents' generation. One of Howatch's great themes comes out here as in most of her other novels: "the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children." Yet this is not because of God's vindictiveness, but the natural consequence of evil in family dynamics. It's powerful because it rings so true emotionally. We see this in our own world: "When the parents go off the rails, it's the children that suffer most," one of the characters says.

But there's also a beauty to how the generations are innerconnected. This quote in particular brought that home to me:

"When I was two," she said, "my father died in the Boer War. I have no memory of him. I thought later, How sad I can't remember him, can't grieve as I should--for of course to me he wasn't a hero, he was just someone who'd gone away and left us, and I resented him for being killed and then I felt guilty that I resented him, and what with all the resentment and the guilt I never thought that the grief would come, I thought I'd never hear his echo in time, and indeed I forgot all about grieving, but gradually, as I grew up, other people would talk to me about him, and I thought, Why do they do this, what makes them speak now after so many years, and then suddenly I realized it was because of me, because I was the echo for those people, and for them the past wan't lost far away down the straight line after all but coming back towards them in a curve. It was as if he was still alive, for when they looked at me they saw him, and when I understood this, when I understood he was present in me, then I knew him, then he became real to me, then the resentment died and the guilt fell away and at last, years after his death, I was able to grieve."

I'm sorry to have to take a hiatus from South Wales while I read a book for a book club (Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow). I'd especially been enjoying the "visit" to Rhossili Downs, a place I'd spent a week while studying abroad in 1990. We'll see if I can be disciplined and wait to read volume 2.