HIGH TIME
by Hannah Rothschild
The once-wealthy, forever-entitled British aristocrats who lost their ancestral mansion in the crash of 2008 in House of Trelawney (2020) face new challenges in 2016-2017.
The focus here is on Ayesha, the illegitimate daughter rejected by the rest of the Trelawney family. Disdain turned to hatred after her wealthy husband, sleazy stock manipulator Sir Thomlinson Sleet, bought 800-year-old Trelawney Castle for her as a wedding present. Ayesha didn’t marry for love, but she did think Sleet would bring her security, a belief that proves unfounded when he becomes infatuated with a sexy cryptocurrency con artist and casually decides to dump Ayesha and get custody of their 5-year-old daughter…just because. Insecure, status-seeking Sleet is a monster painted with such broad strokes he might as well have a mustache to twirl, and the rest of Rothschild’s characterizations are equally clichéd. Despite her first-class degree and a prestigious art history prize, Ayesha comes across for 90% of the novel as a helpless victim; her only family ally, the Honourable Anthony Scott, is a stereotypical elderly gay man (an interior decorator, no less), and secondary characters like “aging minor royal” Princess Amelia are given to credulity-straining remarks such as, “In the good old days, ‘help’ had nowhere else to go….Now they have such highfalutin ideas. I blame the Chinese.” To give Rothschild her due, she crafts an enjoyably complicated narrative that eventually enables Ayesha to stymie some of Sleet’s nefarious plans and convince her hostile relatives she’s not so bad after all. Brexit, Donald Trump’s election, multiple financial shenanigans, and a clever scam involving risqué paintings hidden away by Iran’s puritanical regime are among the plot elements that will keep readers turning pages to find out what happens next. The abundance of machinations by a horde of not especially memorable characters, however, makes it likely that little of it will be remembered once the last chapter is finished.
Moderately entertaining but very thin.