- Paperback: 271 pages
- Publisher: Vintage; New edition edition (2 Sep 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0099274620
- ISBN-13: 978-0099274629
- Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 12.8 x 2.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 468,620 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Service Of Clouds
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
The Service of the Clouds uses the interesting device of a split narrative to tell the separate life stories of a mother and her son. Flora, the mother, has a difficult relationship with her own mother and leaves home early to work as a governess for a six-year-old boy. But, after the accidental death of the boy in her charge, she finds herself haunted her for the rest of her life as she drifts through various jobs. It is only when she accepts the help of a benevolent former employer, though, that she is able to put behind her the burdens of a failed relationship and debilitating illness to pursue her interest in art. Eventually she agrees to marry, though aware that it will be a marriage of affection and safety rather than love and passion.
The story of her son, who is a doctor, is told in between that of his mother, and though at no point do the narratives overlap, the parallels are sometimes striking. His life echoes hers through the strange awareness of death they share, and their similarly perfunctory marriages.
Hill concentrates so excessively on the internal thoughts and feelings of her characters that she up producing little more than an emotional map of their lives, which would, perhaps, work better were it not so heavily layered with mawkish sentiment. Fans may adore this novel, but others may find its laboured prose just a little bit too much. --Claire Allfree
Product Description
At the far end of the long white gallery is a painting of a women, in pale flowing clothes and lying on a sofa beside an open window. The muslin curtains billow out towards her like clouds. There is a touch of brilliant red, the ribbon on her hat. The rest is the white, cream, palest grey. It is a painting which leads Flora on, beckoning her away from her childhood, her complaining, clinging mother, pert younger sister, and the confines of a small community, to a proud and self-reliant future. But later, its image is to prove the catalyst for the most signicant event in her life. Isolation, separation, solitude, betrayal. The shocks of life. The consolations and the beauty of death. A few piercing moments of absolute joy and perfect understanding. THE SERVICE OF CLOUDS is about these things, and also a bout love, loyalty, friendship, growing up and growing old.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
28 of 28 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Some reviews have described this book as full of brutality and hopelessness. This is, I think, an insensitive reading.
In a dual narrative we follow the ambitions and disappointments of Flora into a loveless, but content, marriage which gives her the all-encompassing love of her son Hugh, whose similar story we also follow.
This is a brave book, that is moving and beautifully written, focussing on how we are moulded by our families, our environment, and by those moments which we never forget - death, heartbreak, love.
Though this is an exploration of characters never far from an awareness of death, it is not hopelessness we feel, but the dignity and honesty of death - and of lives, though stunted, that have a real engagement with the numinous.
I loved this book, quite unlike anything I have read before
In a dual narrative we follow the ambitions and disappointments of Flora into a loveless, but content, marriage which gives her the all-encompassing love of her son Hugh, whose similar story we also follow.
This is a brave book, that is moving and beautifully written, focussing on how we are moulded by our families, our environment, and by those moments which we never forget - death, heartbreak, love.
Though this is an exploration of characters never far from an awareness of death, it is not hopelessness we feel, but the dignity and honesty of death - and of lives, though stunted, that have a real engagement with the numinous.
I loved this book, quite unlike anything I have read before
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
As with the pretty basket of trims and ribbons used by Flora in her hat making phase, the indefatigable, magpie like brain of Susan Hill has gathered up all kinds of sparkly delights in this reflective, time mingling, saga. We have just a handful of folk here to get to know but, oh, in such a rich, deep way. My favourite kind of book; not too many people!
Making the intriguing and instantly truthful point that sometimes houses mean more than people, Susan Hill touches a nerve. "They shelter us" and we fall in love with them. All our lives we can roam old homes in our minds, revisiting long lost stairways, attic rooms, gardens and treasured spaces. Regrets for left behind places, and wistfulness for the old lives carried on therein, are the most poignant of emotional strings to tug at. Can they mean more to us than the cast of our lives? How much would we bargain away to stay in them? That for me was the delicious point of `The Service of Clouds'.
Serious, clever, lively Flora, we meet at all her ages; busy being moved forever on by art, stories and colour. Yearning for more than her prescribed little life; falling in love with a passion, beginning with a painting, then a house, then a man and finally her only child. Although at first it seems we are to get to know her son Hugh, the good doctor we meet in middle age with retirement pressing ever nearer, it is the remarkable figure of Flora who emerges into the spotlight.
Hugh has a desire to be with the soon to die. He indulges his personal need to the benefit of his patients and himself. Such good company in one's last hours is to be wished for. All this generosity of spirit of course has a reason and that is the building point of the story.
I absolutely loved this and will read it again, recommend it and lend it. A quite unusual work that once again demonstrates the tremendous versatility of Susan Hill, a writer I am so grateful to have got to know.
Making the intriguing and instantly truthful point that sometimes houses mean more than people, Susan Hill touches a nerve. "They shelter us" and we fall in love with them. All our lives we can roam old homes in our minds, revisiting long lost stairways, attic rooms, gardens and treasured spaces. Regrets for left behind places, and wistfulness for the old lives carried on therein, are the most poignant of emotional strings to tug at. Can they mean more to us than the cast of our lives? How much would we bargain away to stay in them? That for me was the delicious point of `The Service of Clouds'.
Serious, clever, lively Flora, we meet at all her ages; busy being moved forever on by art, stories and colour. Yearning for more than her prescribed little life; falling in love with a passion, beginning with a painting, then a house, then a man and finally her only child. Although at first it seems we are to get to know her son Hugh, the good doctor we meet in middle age with retirement pressing ever nearer, it is the remarkable figure of Flora who emerges into the spotlight.
Hugh has a desire to be with the soon to die. He indulges his personal need to the benefit of his patients and himself. Such good company in one's last hours is to be wished for. All this generosity of spirit of course has a reason and that is the building point of the story.
I absolutely loved this and will read it again, recommend it and lend it. A quite unusual work that once again demonstrates the tremendous versatility of Susan Hill, a writer I am so grateful to have got to know.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I can understand someone finding this too gloomy, too filled with a quiet despair. But I found the prose almost haunting and meditative, each sentence almost like a cloud, each paragraph a larger cloud, and the whole thing like a mass of grey sky. There are many references to cloud, and this style feels quite deliberate. It is a dark book, but I didn't find it depressing, though Susan Hill seemed to reach the end of the line she was travelling on when she wrote this. Another one to rediscover for those not too happy with her Crime output.
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