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The Safekeep won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.

 

It’s also a book with an intriguing title, a title that will become increasingly significant as the story progresses.

 

After telling you that you are in The Netherlands in 1961 (don’t overlook that title to Part 1), Van der Wouden plunges you into Isabel’s story. But there is no description of Isabel. Instead there is a vividly described garden.

 

‘Spring had brought a shock of frost, a week of wet snow, and now­–at the lip of summer–the vegetable garden was shrinking into itself.’

 

It soon becomes clear that Isabel is ‘nearly thirty’, lives alone in a house that she considers it her duty to look after and has a tenuous hold on reality. She hasn't come to terms with the death of her mother and is obsessed with the idea that the maid is stealing from her. Her memories of  first moving into the house during the German occupation of the Netherlands do not agree with her younger brother’s but the two do agree that they moved into the house when they were children and it was fully furnished.

 

And that is your first clue about this house. The house Isabel is keeping safe.

 

A bit of background. Twenty thousand Dutch people starved to death in the winter and spring of 1944/1945. The famine hit hardest in the cities in the west of the country. Isabel’s uncle found a house in the rural east for Isabel, her mother and her two brothers. It was a house with a vegetable garden. Isabel still keeps the vegetable garden, but she considers housework and cooking activities she employs someone else to do.

 

Then Isabel's elder brother sends his latest girlfriend to stay with her, while he works abroad. This is Eva, and she is the other main character in the book. Eva apparently doesn’t know what to do with her enforced idleness.

 

Tensions are high in the house. Isabel hates and despises Eva and Isabel is very good at hate. She has a lot of emotional suppression and self-delusion to work through. Her awakening is sudden and at the same time both painful and glorious. The reader is perched on a seesaw swinging up, thinking she has worked out what is really going on, then plummeting down as she realises she has no idea.

 

As the story digs deeper it becomes clear that it’s not just Isabel’s self-delusion that is at stake here. It’s the self-delusion of the entire Dutch nation, still reeling from the trauma of the war; still dealing with its unexpected consequences. There is no taking of sides here. Evil emerges in the spaces between what people did or didn’t do, the opportunities for charity and honesty they missed, the promises they failed to keep and the lies they told themselves. There is the tragedy of people trying to survive and go forward and the tragedy of people who didn’t and can’t. Evil is not large and brutal and German; it is small and Dutch. It's an evil that can be dissipated by small actions but if, and only if, there is emotional honesty.

 

The trouble is that Isabel is very bad at emotional honesty.

 

Then there is love, with all its pains, joy and delusions. There is the love between siblings and there is sexual love. There is a lot of sex in this book. I’m often surprised at how many times people comment on a book and never mention the sex. There are pages and pages of it in The Safekeep. Its well written, believable and in-character sex, but if you want to skip it just go ahead.

 

Who is Eva really? That will become the question on your mind as you read. There are lots of clues and I’m sure you will work out most of it before the long section of Eva’s diary entries that tell all her backstory. This is not a device I like, especially if the entries are realistic, as they are here. Diary entries drop the reader into an environment they don’t know, with characters they don’t know and emotions that have no context. And they are aways formatted in pages and pages of italics. I hate them. I skip them.

 

It doesn’t matter. The story works just fine without them.

 

I’ve seen it said that the ending of The SafeKeep is unexpected. I thought it the only possible redemptive ending for a book about people who were longing for reconciliation and integration with the past, even when they didn’t know that’s what they were doing.

 

If you like a book with twists and turns, if you like an untrustworthy narrator, if you feel, like me, that the shadow of World War Two still looms over Europe and it is not one we should ignore, then the Safekeep is for you.

 

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