Aaron Fortune on Goodreads – 5 stars
Turn Right at the Rainbow presents itself as a memoir about moving house. It is really about what home means, and how long it can take to recognise that you have already found it.
Roz Morris sets out to find a new house with her husband Dave, and the search supplies plenty of comedy: eccentric sellers, stranger houses, and estate agents behaving exactly as estate agents do. Beneath that runs something far more tender. She grew up in Alderley Edge, the landscape Alan Garner made mythic, and as a child she was captivated by the tunnels beneath it, some of them dating to the Bronze Age. Her childhood home has vanished while the land endures, and the book keeps asking what we truly belong to: bricks, hills, people, or the story we tell about ourselves. Then there is Dave’s house, with its genuine church pulpit marooned in an overgrown garden, its parade of writers and gamers, and the faint traces of a previous partner. Morris spends years feeling like a visitor in the place that has already become home.
What makes it exceptional is the writing. Her sentences are short, dry and exact, and she has a gift for the brief line that lands both the joke and the ache. Houses keep ghosts, ask questions and give her talkings-to. Wry self-mockery slides into real grief without any signal that the gear has changed, which is far harder to do than she makes it look. Her recurring jokes return as old friends rather than tics.
Readers of Deborah Levy’s ‘living autobiography’ books or Penelope Lively’s memoirs will recognise the register, with a touch of Alan Bennett’s deadpan. This was a change of pace from my usual reading, and I found it particularly poignant. It has stayed with me. I recommend it warmly to anyone who has ever wondered where they belong, and what it truly means to be home.
