A History of Silence

In elegiac, mesmerizing prose, English writer Neil's fourth novel (after The Possession of Delia Sutherland) weds the stories of two sisters--one vital but self-destructive, the other a dependable, soul-shriveled healer who can't heal herself--bound by their painful past. Roberta Heath, known in her family by the neutering names Robs and Aunt Bob, shuts down her physical therapy practice, leaves her London flat to her invasive mother and sister and sets off to become the private employee of a wealthy Louisiana family. Addressed there as Miss Heath, she lives like a postmodern British governess, except that her charge is not a child but Raoul Patout, a family patriarch debilitated by polio in his youth and a stroke in his old age. As Roberta works to restore movement to Raoul's left arm, he works to restore her spirit. Just when he seems to have the cure for Roberta (his nephew Patrick Janvier and the nephew's lively children), who should arrive to take it all away but the family Roberta fled: her mother, her nephew and her sister, Laura. Never before able to resist a man who beat her, Laura now enchants the gentle Patrick, and Roberta steps aside without complaint. What drives these sisters to their compulsions and binds them to each other and to their mother is the abuse they suffered but never discussed at the hands of their father, a faith healer. Although the Spanish moss hangs too thickly over this novel, Neil often succeeds in capturing the gesture that conveys the ache inside her characters, and her descriptions of work, what a physical therapist thinks and how a singer sings, are persuasive and powerful, as is her cinematic rendering of Raoul Patout. Too bad, then, that the ending disappoints, a few handy deaths and accidents standing in for a resolution of the conflicts Neil has so carefully delineated. (Sept.)