Product Description

Mark and Claire seem an ideal couple. He is an accountant, she the daughter of a successful businessman. They live in a comfortable middle-class village in Surrey. Then, during a party for their daughter Pippa's baptism, their son Jeremy is knocked down on the road outside. It is their worst nightmare, something they thought could never happen, and the consequences will affect each one of them more than they could possibly imagine. What is Claire's guilty secret, and can her wealthy, self-made father help? Will Mark, desperate to escape, have the nerve to leave? And how will Pippa be affected by the turmoil that began on the day of her own christening? The once ideal marriage is troubled by the stress, the pressure caused by Jeremy's state of health. But is Jeremy the glue that holds the marriage together, however tenuously?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #27915 in Books
• Published on: 2001-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Mark and Claire and their families are celebrating daughter Pippa's christening in the back garden of their substantial Surrey house.

Everything's going swimmingly: their four-year-old son Jeremy is playing with almost-four-year-old Michael and arguing with his dad about whether he can call next door's dog, Rags, through the hole in the hedge.

Then the white rabbit appears--an escaped pet--and Jeremy chases it. But instead of leading Jeremy down a rabbit hole, like Alice, into a topsy-turvy world of mad hatters, petulant queens and hookah-smoking caterpillars, the rabbit careers straight out onto the road. Jeremy follows--"there was no 'don't' to cover the present situation even if he had not been recklessly intent on the pursuit"--running headlong into a red sports car being driven at 60 miles an hour by a young man who had had too much to drink.

He survives. But he's paralysed from the neck down and severely brain-damaged.

The Clematis Tree follows the attempts of Jeremy's family to live their lives in the years following the accident: coping as Jeremy's health declines, dealing with their grief, guilt and the conflicting feelings of love and resentment for Jeremy and for each other. While Mark becomes increasingly ineffective at work, Claire, using her son's needs as an excuse, retreats into a self-imposed isolation, and Pippa suffers from her parents' growing irritability. Then Claire's younger sister Sally, the flame-haired Conservative backbencher introduces her Terminally Ill Persons Bill--designed to legalise euthanasia. And suddenly the press are interested in Jeremy.

Politician Ann Widdecombe's first novel is a deeply serious investigation of the effects of tragedy on nuclear and extended families, and an occasionally didactic and unfashionable paean to faith and duty. --Lisa Gee

Amazon.co.uk Review
Mark and Claire and their families are celebrating daughter Pippa's christening in the back garden of their substantial Surrey house. Everything's going swimmingly: their four-year-old son Jeremy is playing with almost-four-year-old Michael and arguing with his dad about whether he can call next door's dog, Rags, through the hole in the hedge.

Then the white rabbit appears--an escaped pet--and Jeremy chases it. But instead of leading Jeremy down a rabbit hole, like Alice, into a topsy-turvey world of mad hatters, petulant queens and hookah-smoking caterpillars, the rabbit careers straight out onto the road. Jeremy follows--"there was no 'don't' to cover the present situation even if he had not been recklessly intent on the pursuit"--running headlong into a red sports car being driven at 60 miles an hour by a young man who had had too much to drink.

He survives. But he's paralysed from the neck down and severely brain-damaged.

The Clematis Tree follows the attempts of Jeremy's family to live their lives in the years following the accident: coping as Jeremy's health declines, dealing with their grief, guilt and the conflicting feelings of love and resentment for Jeremy and for each other. While Mark becomes increasingly ineffective at work, Claire, using her son's needs as an excuse, retreats into a self-imposed isolation, and Pippa suffers from her parents' growing irritability. Then Claire's younger sister Sally, the flame-haired Conservative backbencher introduces her Terminally Ill Persons Bill--designed to legalise euthanasia. And suddenly the press are interested in Jeremy.

Politician Ann Widdecombe's first novel is a deeply serious investigation of the effects of tragedy on nuclear and extended families, and an occasionally didactic and unfashionable paean to faith and duty. --LisaGee

About the Author
Tory MP for Maidstone. In John Major's Government she was Home Office Minister under Michael Howard. Shadow Home Secretary 1997-2001. Unmarried and a Roman Catholic convert. Has been writing since at school where she won essay prizes. Now writing third novel.

Customer Reviews

'Small and determinedly old-fashioned'
First of all, this book IS readable - which always sounds like faint praise, but isn't meant to be - and it carefully sets out the conflicting viewpoints regarding euthanasia. The central image of the Clematis Tree is effective and surprisingly touching.

However, these positive points are more than outweighed by the negative ones. The prose is humdrum and in dire need of editing (far too much information on the making of sandwiches, the pouring and carrying and quaffing of drinks, and so on). Only with Mark does Ms Widdecombe even attempt anything approaching full characterisation. The other figures are clichéd or cardboard: Sally has long red hair and is clever, Sam is a plain-speaking businessman, and as for Clare, she hardly even qualifies as a cipher. Everyone speaks in the same stilted and unconvincing manner except for Sam. The author never lets us forget he is from Yorkshire, and so for the first 200 pages, every time he has dialogue, the words 'champion' and 'lass' are worked in - and even on one occasion, 'right champion'.

It seems to me that Ms Widdecombe lacks the one crucial element for a successful novelist: she cannot empathise with people from outside her social class or with those who do not share her views. When Ginny, Mark's Australian secretary, blurts out that she votes Labour at home, from Clare's horrified, tight-lipped reaction, you would think that Ginny had just confessed to selling crack at the school gates. In addition there is a vein of jaw-droppingly offensive snobbery against working and lower middle class women: they all wear short skirts, have dyed hair, smoke, and talk about boyfriends and nail polish; when the woman from Social Services turns up, we are informed that her hair is several days overdue for a wash.

Another problem is that the author is completely out of touch with modern life. She does not appear to know how people, ordinary or otherwise, actually live, what they wear, how they talk, what things are likely to happen to them, how they would react. Mark and Clare are outraged when people treat their disabled son as if he does not know what is going on around him, yet have sex in front of him (and the cat!).

Ginny is in her twenties and has come to England on a working holiday. One evening she goes to see A Little Night Music with a friend. Now I know anyone of any age may be a fan of Stephen Sondheim, but if Ms Widdecombe had asked around and found the name of a club or a gig Ginny might have been going to instead, this would have had the advantage of seeming to broaden her range of characters.

Later, Mark reads a financial report in a national newspaper with which he disagrees; he composes an article in reply, sends it off and is rewarded by a phone call from the editor, and a promise of payment and publication. I dare say this would happen to Anne Widdecombe, but Mark is only an ordinary accountant: surely the most he could hope for would be an unpaid appearance on the letters page?

There are many more examples of these kind of implausibilities: the young boy who says 'old chap'; the teacher who wears 'a floral frock more suited to a beach' (when did you last see anyone in a floral frock on a beach?); Mark's tan and flat stomach, despite working in a dingy basement office and taking no exercise; his plans to watch the original version of All Quiet on the Western Front on television one evening after work (a black and white film from 1930 in prime time? come off it!); his sudden access of Widdecombesque knowledge about the habits of newspaper editors once reporters are camped outside his house.

Early in the novel, Aunt Isabel's kitchen is described as 'small, modern and determinedly old-fashioned'. At the time I dismissed this as another one of the author's inept descriptions (like that of the boy in hospital who, bandaged head to toe, is laughing uproariously at something said to him by a nurse - how could they tell?), but knock out its second and third words and you have an apt description of the whole work: 'small and determinedly old-fashioned.' The bottom line is that this book wasn't worth publishing, and probably wouldn't have been without its celebrity by-line.

Interesting subject matter, but badly written
It is hard to believe that a book so badly written as this one has received as many as 5, 5* reviews. But read them - they sound as if they have come from Ann Widdecombe's press office!

I was drawn to this book by the subject matter, which could have been really interestingly developed. But unfortunately the writing is dire, there is page after page of trivial detail (for example, 4 pages (yes four!) to describe a delayed commuter journey), the characters are one-dimensional and stereotyped, and the dialogue is stilted and unrealistic.

Indeed the whole thing reads like a vehicle for Ms Widdecombe to expound her views on the subject of euthanasia - if only she hadn't done it at such length!

If you want to read interesting books that discuss provocative and unusual subjects then I suggest you try Jodi Picoult.

Highly intelligent but unremittingly grim
This is a book that brings no joy. At the end of it I felt like curling up in a ball under a warm blanket for a week.

Questions of conscience are raised every time the reader begins to feel the least bit comfortable. Human weaknesses are stripped bare and examined microscopically. Even the characters in the book are starkly aware of all their failings but nothing is excused and no hope is offered.

Do not read this book if your optimism is anything less than unassailable. Read it if you hate people.