‘Across the courtyard the water glistens a pale blue, the sun’s rays shimmering on its surface. The surrounding garden is wild and overgrown with trees and bushes tinged reddish orange, overlooking a valley of scorched grass fields.’ This is the setting of Chloë Ashby’s Family Friends. Taking place over one eventful holiday between old university friends in the south of France, it’s a sun-soaked work simmering with secrets that lurk just below the surface.
First, a look at our cast of characters. There’s the ‘endlessly reliable’ Maggie, with weak, ‘beautiful in a boyish way’ Will and their two children, Alice and ‘gangly’ teenage Sammy. They’re spending a week with the wealthy art dealer Lydia, charismatic and chic, whose family home they’re staying in, and her leonine husband Roland, who started out as her professor. An added complication is Roland’s 18-year-old daughter Issy from his first marriage, unnerving in her beauty and grieving the loss of her mother.
It’s immediately clear that, despite the couples’ initial closeness, there’s a storm threatening to break between them, disrupting both the holiday and their long friendship. Ashby flits between the present and their past, as well as perspectives, starting at university and moving forward throughout the years. In other hands, the denouement could be obvious in its anticipation; but Ashby handles dialogue and subtext masterfully, allowing us to view each exchange from every angle and to make up our own minds as to who exactly is in the wrong.
Much of the tension derives from the romantic history between Lydia and Will. We learn about this through devastatingly sensual flashbacks and through the facade they maintain, which becomes less and less convincing. There’s a real sense of a clawing back to their youth, something made even more apparent through the burgeoning relationship that forms between Issy and Sammy. The latter two tread the line between childhood and adulthood, with ‘limbs tangled like fizzy strawberry laces’, while Lydia and Will’s spark feels born more out of desperation than anything else.
A portrait of long-standing friendships and the ways in which they can be warped, the novel is a sharp insight into the lengths to which we’ll go to preserve the ways we view ourselves, and others view us.
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