Lisa St Aubin de Terán gained her exotic sounding name from a mix of her mothers maiden name (St Aubin) and her first husband’s surname (Terán) of which more later. Born in London she was just twenty nine in 1982 when she wrote this, her first novel, but had already by then amassed life events enough for any aspiring writer to draw on. The novel tells the story of Londoner Lydia Sinclair who at the age of seventeen marries thirty five year old Venezuelan Don Diego Beltrán and goes to South America to live with him on his vast but declining estate. The book starts with a prologue which is set in the present day and tells how Lydia ended up in Venezuela before diving back over the two centuries of the rise and fall of the Beltrán family and estate until Don Diego is virtually the last of the family, and even he has a stroke several years into the marriage and is paralysed.

But the story of the early years of the Beltrán’s is of strong and powerful men rising to senior political and military ranks backed by the wealth from their estate. It is only after a horrific massacre of the family a century ago, men, women and children gunned down by soldiers goaded by members of a rival dynasty and a plague of locusts that destroyed all the crops in the valley leaving the villagers starving and almost as importantly the sugar cane that was the source of the money. The years of drought during Lydia’s time was the final straw, nothing is left, it is time to go. It sounds like a depressing read and in places it is but there is still some lightness to provide succour to the reader and it is certainly well worth reading. I also have her second novel ‘The Slow Train to Milan’ which is also based on her life with Jaime from after their marriage but before they finally moved to Venezuela and were instead travelling around Europe with increasingly bizarre experiences

Keepers of the House gets its title from a quote in the bible, specifically Ecclesiastes 12, and won the British literary prize The Somerset Maugham Award in 1983, which ironically is “to enable young writers to enrich their work by gaining experience of foreign countries.” whilst St Aubin de Terán had already had seven years of experiences in Venezuela, which was used as the basis of the novel, and was now safely back in England. I have written about one of her other autobiographical books in another blog back in 2020 ‘A Valley in Italy‘ and up until now have largely read her non-fiction works but have recently purchased a couple of her novels, this one included. I was struck particularly by the similarities between the stories of fictional Lydia and real life Lisa when comparing this book to ‘The Hacienda’, her memoir of her time in Venezuela published in 1997. If you thought that the plot of the novel was somewhat far fetched then the real story of Lisa is definitely worth reading as in ‘The Hacienda’ she tell of how she married at the age of sixteen to an exiled Venezuelan man more than twice her age who is wanted in his home country for bank robbery but who nevertheless takes her back to South America to live on his estate. She eventually comes back to England with her daughter Iseult to avoid the planned suicide pact intended by her husband Jaime as he realises that the marriage is falling apart.