Review - The Games House by Claire North

Cover by Lisa Marie Pompilio

The Games House
Claire North
Orbit, 30 May 2019
PB, 410pp

I am so grateful to Nazia at Orbit for sending me a free advance copy of this brilliant book to consider for review. I could kick myself that I hadn't read The Games House already - it has been available for a couple of years but as ebook only and I somehow missed that.

Now, I have the (physical) book in my hands and I can make amends.

"Everyone has heard of the Gameshouse. But few know all its secrets . . .

It is the place where fortunes can be made and lost though chess, backgammon – every game under the sun..."

The Games House is another audacious concept from North: a club where all may come to play games... but with a "Higher League", a select level to which one can only progress by invitation. And the games there are played with pieces on a real board - a board that contains empires, kingdoms, churches.

The coin turns, the game begins. The House is in Venice. In New York. In Tokyo. Walk in. Take a seat. make your move - but be careful what you stake. Players can become pieces and pieces will be played and used up.

The book is divided into three parts.

In the first - The Serpent - set in Renaissance Venice, Thene - a young woman of despised Jesish heritage and in a marriage to a worthless man who is eating up all her money - plays for the right to enter that higher League.  Pieces move on the board - real people, caught up in the mechanisms of the House. Some survive: others do not. It's a tense game which Thene cannot afford to lose if she's to escape her life. Thene plays with skill, accepting the sacrifices she must make. North's ability to sketch a convincing character matters here, Thene's game working through screeds of them but all are vital, breathing figures any of whom who could easily sustain a book of their own (I wanted to know more about all of them!)

The second story - The Thief - follows Remy Burke, a louche figure who could have walked out of a Somerset Maugham short story, in an unwelcome game staged in Siam, just before the Second World War. The background - featuring what are clearly spies, political factions and fugitives - would, again, provide enough colour in itself for a novel. But it's not the main point: the main point is the game that Remy's been tricked into, a desperate game of Hide and Seek where at stake is his very essence. North's description of the pursuit - overseen, as in the first story, by some kind of ambiguous spirit or actor above, but not totally removed from, the plot - is just masterful, whether describing Remy's sheer desperation, halting moments of tenderness when he is sheltered by a lonely widow - she is shunned, as a childless woman who has survived her husband and had spoken to nobody for seven months, or the man's sheer ingenuity in staying ahead and in the game.

In the final story, The Master, things take a rather different turn, arriving at the present day and an even more desperate game which begins to unsettle Presidents, Chairmen and financial combines. The stakes are if anything even higher - and the player one who may, perhaps, be able to give some answers.

Again, the coin turns...

I just loved this book. North has a slightly oblique style which can take a bit of getting used to (she'll include an overheard conversation to add atmosphere (yet which contains a point relevant later) or a chapter one sentence long, which, again, only slots into he story at the right time and place. And those unseen observers remain mysterious while also becoming very familiar.) But once you do, it's a book you can simply immerse in - in fact you have to, because you won't be able to leave it unfinished. In the end, I think, a very humane book, observing all manner of human folly and wrongness as well as little acts of goodness and courage, but not judging and not setting up heroes or villains. Especially not that, because, of course, it's all a game, isn't it?

Strongly recommended. VERY strongly. (And look at that pretty cover!)

Links

For more about the book, see the Orbit website here.

If you want to read my reviews of some of North's previous books, see links to Touch, The Sudden Appearance of Hope, The End of the Day and 84K.

To buy The Games House, try your local bookshop - including via Hive Books - or look at Blackwell's, Waterstones or Amazon.