Booker Prize review: Desire, suspicion, and obsession comprise the emotional core of ‘The Safekeep’

A house is a precious thing. But what do we really know about the land it stands on, the hands it has passed through before it became yours to have? A house is the most solid, permanent possession one can own. A house, as it goes through seasons and generations, is a reminder of our place in the world. It is a proof of our existence, a tether to what came before us and what will follow, and most importantly, the north star that’ll guide us back to safety and shelter as we go out into the world to create our destinies.

The house

In The Safekeep, author Yael Van Der Wouden takes the reader to the Netherlands countryside where a grand house stands tall and proud even in the years following the aftermath of the Second World War. Boasting many rooms and stuffed with knickknacks of all kinds, the house is now in the sole care of Isabel, a nearly 30-year-old woman. She has been left behind in this house after her mother’s death and her brothers’ departures. One left because their mother did not accept his sexuality while the other is a womaniser and cannot be pinned down to a place.

Though Isabel is in charge of the house, it does not legally belong to her. The house was a gift from her uncle to her mother – and it’d be passed down to Louis the womaniser as soon as he found a woman to settle down with. While they wait for that to happen, Isabel bids time by guarding the house militantly and being overly protective of its belongings. She suspects the maid Neelke pockets the china and the silverware while she’s not looking. Isabel’s world is contained in these material things – though she doesn’t know how exactly these came into her family’s possession.

The house was already filled with furniture, crockery, and decorative pieces before they had moved in. It was a world of its own and Isabel and her family seemed to have stumbled upon it. She was fascinated by the tasteful, expensive things in it but her memory fails to provide clear answers about how they could have afforded these beautiful things. Still, these objects become a tangible memory of her mother and Isabela will do anything to keep the house in order, keep things as they were, and no petty thief will come in her way.

However, her lonely – and contained – existence is disturbed when Louis insists she let his girlfriend put up with her for a few weeks. Eva is everything Isabel is not – loud, flamboyant, and has a flair for drama. Isabel cannot stand the intrusion and makes her dislike of Eva clear. As the two first avoid and then collide with each other, tensions of all kinds begin to rise. Isabel detects a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach, the space between her legs. Eva’s presence is enough to send her into a tizzy. Her mother’s disapproval of Hendrick and his homosexual liaisons weigh heavily on Isabel as she tries to come to terms with her identity – and its unpleasant reckonings.

The house feels both immense and suffocating as she grapples with her intimacy with Eva. They both hold up pretences for the world while hot, feverish nights are spent together. Still, Wouden holds herself from entirely revealing Isabel to the reader – we see her as the anxious, grieving person she is through her brother Hendrik’s eyes. Her habit of pinching herself, stuttering when nervous, her reluctance to welcome in the neighbour who seems to be interested in her all point to a reluctance to the life she has been forced to live. A life that she unwittingly thinks she has chosen for herself.

The highs and the lows

The only advantage of having the house to themselves is the privacy Eva and Isabel are granted as their relationship takes a more physical, carnal turn. These frequent encounters are replicated in the plot – the gasps, sighs, moans, the reluctance to fully give in. At this point, the rest of the story becomes secondary to the sexual action on the page – and despite the steaminess, the reader starts to feel weary. The story gets weighed down by the details of these escapades and you can’t wait for the inevitable bitterness to set in between the two if only for the novel to pick up pace again.

The mystery of the missing silverware and china when revealed does not shock. The setup for the revelation is lazy and you prepare yourself for the most obvious outcome, and unfortunately, Wouden plays right into it. Eva takes charge in the final section of the novel – her family’s origin, its roots, its connection to Isabel’s house are predictable too. Still, the solemnity of history is such that it is not possible to read about the Second World War or the Holocaust without experiencing the acute horrors of these projects.

The Safekeep reminds the world of the Dutches’ complicity in Nazism – something that not many of us know or remember. The emotional core of the story is at times compromised by its gimmicky attempts to double up as a quasi-mystery novel. The greatest strength of the novel – besides revisiting the Nethereland’s anti-semitic past – is the stripped-back but heartfelt portrayal of parental abuse, queerness and the question of acceptance, and coming to terms with the possibility that one could be an oppressor simply by the merit of their birth. The assured emotional heft of the novel quietly carries it through even as it is occasionally rocked by the choppy waters of the excesses of its own making.

The Safekeep, Yael Van Der Wouden, Viking.