The Childrens Home: Charles Lambert

I was introduced to the work of Charles Lambert in 2010 through the novel, Any Human Face.  In 2011 I read Little Monsters, The Slave House in 2013, and A View from the Tower in 2014. The Children’s Home was my first book for 2016, and it’s a complete change of pace for this author. Following the trajectory of a nightmare, the book starts with the feeling of a fairy tale, morphs into fable and then the mirror cracks to reveal a dystopian horror. This genre-defying book is being compared to the work of Neil Gaiman, and although I’m not that familiar with Gaiman’s work to make a comparison, I think it’s best to judge the novel on its own merit.

The novel concerns a hideously disfigured recluse, Morgan, who lives in a rambling, elaborate walled country estate, in a house designed by his grandfather. Very little information is given at first about Morgan, his life, his family’s fortune or why he has chosen to isolate himself, but gradually over the course of the novel, some of the mystery is peeled away. Although each chapter begins with a childlike tagline, this is not a children’s book.

Morgan lives with a housekeeper named Engel, and shortly after she arrives, the outside world begins to penetrate through the gated estate when children inexplicably begin to appear. The first one, named Moira, is left on the steps in a basket:

Other children arrived soon after that, as though Morgan had earned them by taking the first one in. Some were abandoned, as Moira had been, left on the kitchen step, which was now checked hourly; others, he suspected, were given to Engel at the door, by whom, he didn’t know. These were the children who arrived empty-handed. By the end of the third month of Moira’s presence in the house, there were six or seven, he wasn’t sure exactly, of varying ages.

Even though the number of children grows, it remains a mystery just how they arrive in this walled estate, and then as Morgan stands by the drawing-room window

a square of air above the lawn seemed to ripple as though it were silk and a knife had been drawn across it, and a child appeared on the lawn and began to walk towards the house, perfectly confident it seemed, that she would be received.

The children increase in number, until the house begins to resemble an unofficial orphanage, and there’s something strange about the children–especially a little boy named David who arrives with a cardboard tag tied to his wrist. Morgan notes the children don’t seem quite normal.

“Have you ever noticed.” he said, “that the children seem to know when they’re not wanted, not in the ministerial sense, of course, but, you know, when somebody simply wants to be quiet, I suppose I mean when I want to quiet? They just disappear, they make themselves scare, as though they’ve never been in the house at all, as though they’ve never existed. And then. just when you notice and start to wonder where they are, when you start to worry about them, I suppose, although you might not realize it’s worry, it registers as a sort of apprehension, they reappear as miraculously as they disappeared. They pop up from behind the sofa or you hear them crying or calling things out in the garden. But haven’t you sometimes ever wondered just where they go?” He paused for a moment. When he continued his voice was hesitant. “It’s as though they came from the air,” he said.

Although Morgan doesn’t know it, the arrival of the children signals an end to his chosen isolation. Soon Doctor Crane is called to visit the children, and gradually Morgan is forced back into the world he has chosen to abandon even as the children explore the house and discover secrets Morgan is unaware of. As Morgan is forced to deal with his past, the horrific present arrives and brings catastrophe….

The Children’s Home has an eerie ability to get under one’s skin. It’s a nightmarish tale of dysfunctional families, cruelty, greed, sinister government agencies, and global ruin that starts ever so simply with the appearance of a fairy tale and then expands as Morgan’s chosen isolation drops away. In spite of the way this novel began, I knew that Charles Lambert wasn’t going to give us Mary Poppins but that there was some deeper, much darker play at work. There’s a lot going on in this deeply layered novel, and as Morgan’s horrific secret is gradually revealed with the children accepting their adoptive father for his kindness and loving qualities, we learn that there’s more than one reason to stay behind the high walls of Morgan’s protected estate. Ultimately the novel, which may have difficulty attracting its appropriate audience, makes an irrefutable statement that the measure of any society can be drawn in its attitude towards its children.

Given my fascination with crime novels, The Children’s Home is not my favourite Charles Lambert novel but I shan’t forget it, and it proves what I’ve suspected, that Lambert is capable of a range of work–evident, IMO, in Little Monsters.

Review copy.