Hare House by Sally Hinchcliffe, reviewed by Fiona Rintoul

Mantle, £14.99

Review by Fiona Rintoul

As anyone who has lived in the countryside will know, it is delusional to imagine, as Sally Hinchliffe’s middle-aged, female protagonist does in Hare House, that it harbours “a place of peace, where I might find refuge”. Rural communities seethe with as much intrigue as city offices and staff-rooms, and landscape is as menacing as cityscape.

This inconvenient truism is brought home to Hinchcliffe’s unnamed narrator when she is “hurtling together in silence between the confines of the dykes” with the bus driver on her way home from the local town to the cottage she has rented on the Hare House estate in Dumfries and Galloway. The bus hits a hare on the road, mashing its hindquarters but failing to kill it. Too urban and prissy to put the animal out of its misery, our narrator watches it “take too long to die”. As the moribund hare eyeballs her back, the “peaceful months of dreamless nights and busy days” that she has hitherto enjoyed in her cottage evaporate, just as her youth had done in London.

Also watching her is Janet, who lives in the next-door cottage. A study in be-anoraked Scottish dourness, with the obligatory impenetrable accent, Janet manages to be malicious even when offering helpful lifts into town. But is the older woman a witch, somehow in league with the live hares in the landscape and the stuffed ones in glass cases at Hare House, as Cass, the disturbed flibbertigibbet daughter of the house, maintains, or is she just a joyless busybody?

Either way, it becomes clear that the dying hare on the road is a metaphor both for what is to come and what has been. Did our narrator control its fate, or was it controlling hers? This question of who’s the victim and who’s the perpetrator pertains to the two intertwined mysteries – one in the past and one in the present – that lie at heart of Hinchcliffe’s dark and absorbing second novel.

As we learn that our nameless narrator has fled London and her previous job at a private girls’ school in mysterious circumstances, we begin to wonder what made her sixth-form class of fresh, young girls fall down “like petals from a rose”. Who was the victim of this mass fainting? The seasoned teacher grown bitter as love turned sour, or the smirking teenage girl with a “high, light silver” laugh?

Cass has mockery in her armour too, and the present begins to mirror the past. “She was, after all, no more than a silly girl, and I was done with teenage girls,” the ex-teacher, who is now secretly churning out essays for coin, opines, after being dragged past a magic pool to the family graveyard by the too-chummy girl. But when Cass’s brother asks our narrator to tutor his sister through her Highers, she agrees.

Consciously or otherwise, the flame-haired beauty, who has all the loveliness that our narrator believes she has lost, sees through the older woman. “People are always drawn to Maggie’s Pool,” she jokes – or does she? “Especially those with a dark past and a history to hide.” When the ex-teacher loses her rag with the fragile girl over a prank with the stuffed hares in the hallway, we begin seriously to question her reliability as a narrator.

“Too late, I recalled myself,” she tells the increasingly sceptical reader. “A reaction, of course, was what she wanted, what they always wanted.”

A compelling chiller redolent of Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal, Hare House treads the treacherous line between the real and the supernatural with dexterity. It is also a beautiful, if sinister, evocation of the Dumfries and Galloway landscape, which is the only hero in a cast of self-absorbed manipulators and, as the author notes in her acknowledgements, deserves to be better known.