For the past six years Kate Morton has been making tantalising secrets her business. From the long-buried mystery that lies within an English manor house (in 2007’s The House at Riverton), to the hidden history of a Cornish estate and its overgrown garden (2008’s The Forgotten Garden) to the clues tucked into a letter and a brooding castle (2010’s The Distant Hours), the Australian writer has produced three bestsellers that have encapsulated her love for the gothic tradition of concealed secrets – the darker, the better – lurking in grand and gloomy homes.
“I seem to be addicted to using gothic tropes,” agrees Morton. “They’re just the things that I naturally want to explore. There’s the relationship between the present and the past: for me; history by itself is not interesting, it’s the way it refuses to disappear from the present, and the way secrets from the past tend to come up into the future. There are issues of identity, and anxieties around women and their place in the world. And then there are labyrinths, whether they are real ones, like the maze in The Forgotten Garden, or just the puzzle-like nature of my novels.”
It’s a winning formula: Morton’s has been a famously high-profile publishing success story. Like many such stories, hers includes years of self-driven apprenticeship, part-time jobs and rejected manuscripts, but now the author, whose inspirations read like a Who’s Who of the psychologically dark, mysterious and creepy (Barbara Vine, Daphne du Maurier, Margaret Atwood, the Brontës) – can relish the fact that her literary niche has proved enticing on an international level. Riverton, her debut, was a Richard & Judy’s Summer Read, placing it – and Morton – squarely on the book-world map. So far, her novels have sold 7 million copies in 32 languages. “It’s been a surprise,” says Morton, “A happy surprise.”
Her new novel, The Secret Keeper, digs ever more deeply into a layered mesh of multiple secrets and hidden truths. Laurel Nicolson, one of the protagonists, is an actress who draws on her characters’ behind-the-scenes-moments so that she can inhabit them completely: “People marveled at her ability to build characters from the inside out, to submerge herself and disappear beneath the skin of another person, but there was no trick to it; she merely bothered to learn the character’s secrets. Laurel knew quite a bit about keeping secrets. She also knew that was where the real people were found, hiding behind their black spots.” (She’s only human though; in a canny, telling detail, the kind that Morton captures so well, Laurel’s nail-biting habit crops up in times of stress).
One lazy, summer’s day, 50 years ago, Laurel was the only witness to a crime, young enough to be given a plausible explanation for it. But is it the truth? In present-day England, Laurel and her sisters are gathering at their childhood home to keep their mother company on her deathbed. Laurel knows the family history: how her mum, Dorothy, met her dad while working at a boarding house in 1944; she knows that her mother’s family died under the bombs of the Second World War.
What she doesn’t know is why the shadow that was originally cast on her family life in 1961 still looms so large in her imagination. When a photo of two young women – Dorothy and a friend – falls out of an old copy of Peter Pan, Morton takes us back in time to a London of high passions and fierce ambitions flamed by wartime uncertainty and precariousness.
Morton weaves a dynamic tale of pre-and-wartime Britain – and of the social and psychological burdens that took their toll – while infusing her tale with her trademark immersive sense of place: a farm field in sun-soaked Suffolk; a Bournemouth holiday beach; Blitz-harried London. And, for the first time, the colourful, lush, rainforest world of Morton’s childhood makes a cameo appearance. Does this mean she may be setting a future novel Down Under? “I do have ideas that are set there floating around the sides of my imagination,” admits Morton, acknowledging the possibility. But anymore than that, well, that’s a secret she’s keeping to herself.
The Secret Keeper is out now, published by Mantle. Picture copyright Gillian Van Niekerk.