Esmond Warner - is the beating heart of the book. Ilia’s journey - geographic and cultural, from Emilia Terzulli to Mrs.
This catalog includes a pair of Ilia’s bespoke women’s brogues, items of initiation that “announced her life to come in the English countryside, her formal enrollment in the world of the squirearchy, hunting, going to the point-to-point, the harriers, the beagles, the open-gardens scheme, the charity fête.” They also inspire a treatise on the history of the shoe and a consideration of “brogue,” as in accent. Chapter titles refer to objects from this vanished world: Ilia’s powder compact Esmond’s Box Brownie camera nasturtium sandwiches. But, refracted through the prism of one marriage, she also interrogates Britain’s dwindling power in a postcolonial world, ideas of Englishness and the immigrant experience.Īlthough the story is told chronologically - beginning in Italy and ending with the Egyptian revolution of 1952, which led to the family’s dramatic departure from Cairo - there are digressions aplenty along the way. Given her area of expertise, it’s no surprise that Warner should spin such enchanting versions of the fables that underpin her own existence. This delicate dance between the intimacy of “my mother and father” and the remove of “Ilia and Esmond” charts subtle shifts in perspective, and captures that process of transition by which matters of historical record morph into family lore. She vacillates between narrator and character, observation and ownership. One can never really know one’s parents’ lives, Warner argues - or, for that matter, one’s own before the age of 6 - but in embracing embellishment and misinterpretation, she elevates this family history to a work of art far denser and more delightful, both more erudite and earthy than anything that cleaved meticulously to the known facts could have been. The fallibility of the project is built in. Warner knows the cadences of her characters’ speech, certain phrases are presumably excavated from memory, and a rich imagination fills in the rest. Whole sections of “Esmond and Ilia” read like fiction, complete with dialogue and interior thought.
It’s a sort of stepsibling to her 1988 novel, “The Lost Father,” in which an English archivist attempting to unravel the mystery surrounding her Italian grandfather’s death creatively fills in the blanks in his story. In recounting the story of these early years of the couple’s marriage, Warner weaves together fact and fiction in the most dazzling and inventive ways. Henceforth, if anyone wanted Esmond, a telegram addressed to “Bookman, Cairo” would do the trick. Ilia gave birth to Marina in November 1946, and six months later, they bundled up the baby and fled “cold, bomb-scarred, soot-laden and ashen London” for sunnier, more multicultural climes. During the war, he’d described the Egyptian city as his “second home” - a “premonition,” Warner writes, of what lay ahead. He couldn’t find purchase or purpose back on Civvy Street until, that is, he chanced on the idea of moving to Cairo to open a branch of the British booksellers W.H. Wodehouse, addressing Ilia as “old thing” and frequently ending his sentences with “what!”) struggled with the privations of postwar England. But even Esmond (who in his daughter’s rendering talks like a character out of P.G.
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