Philip Ignatius Brooke – aristocrat, playboy, countercultural icon, owner of a 1,000-acre estate in the Sussex countryside – is dead. And no one is especially sad. Certainly not his immediate family, who, convening at the ancestral home, agree that, as well as being a “visionary” and a “legend” for his part in staging the Teddy Bears’ Picnic, a sort of British Woodstock, Philip was undoubtedly “a shit” – a liar, a bully and a cheat.
It is an uncertain legacy. As the central event in Anna Hope’s fifth novel, Albion, his funeral represents a broader cultural laying to rest of all that Philip and his ancestors – and, indeed, the English country house itself – represent: empire, exploitation, entitlement and privilege. Each member of the family, in their own way, wishes to escape the past’s long shadow and begin afresh. Frannie, the eldest, who has inherited the estate, has spent the last 10 years rewilding it and creating a “nature corridor all the way to the sea”. Milo, a recovering alcoholic and sex addict, has grand plans to build a treetop rehabilitation centre for the world’s 1%. Isa, the youngest, wants nothing to do with any of it and has become a teacher at a school in south London; Grace, Philip’s widow, is filled with regret for not having left sooner or protected her children better. And then there is Clara, who may or may not be Philip’s illegitimate daughter. Rather than burying the past, she wishes to bring it into the cold light of day.
