Very little happens in The Weight of Small Rooms, and it is one of the most gripping novels I have read in a long time. Tessaly Marchbank's third book follows Edwin Carrow, a locksmith in a northern English town, over the course of a single winter. Each chapter takes place in a different home he is called to, usually because someone has been locked out, or locked in, or has lost a key that meant more than they can say. There are twelve chapters and twelve rooms.
Edwin is sixty-one, recently widowed and almost comically reticent. He speaks little and notices everything. Through his eyes we meet a teenage girl who has fitted a lock to her bedroom door to keep out her stepfather, an elderly couple who have mislaid the key to a cabinet holding their late son's letters, and a young doctor who wants every lock in her flat replaced after a burglary that took nothing of value. Edwin fixes what he can. He does not pry.
A novel built from thresholds
The structure sounds schematic, and in lesser hands it would be. Marchbank avoids this by allowing the chapters to leak into one another. Characters glimpsed in one home reappear in another. A key cut in October turns up, unexpectedly, in February. Slowly, and without ever announcing itself, a portrait of a town emerges, and within it a portrait of Edwin's own grief, which he has kept behind a door he has not opened since the funeral.
Marchbank's prose is plain in the best sense. Her sentences are short and exact, and she has a gift for the telling physical detail: the smell of a hallway, the particular resistance of a stiff latch, the sound of a kettle in a house where someone has been crying. She never tells us what to feel. The effect is cumulative. By the final chapters, a single line of dialogue about a spare key can land like a blow.
I wanted to write about the rooms people keep closed, and about the strangers we let in to open them. — Tessaly Marchbank
If there is a flaw, it lies in the eighth chapter, set in a wealthy family's country house, which strains a little too hard for satire and sits oddly beside the tenderness of the rest. It is a small misstep in a book of rare control. Marchbank's previous novels, admired and little read, suggested a writer of great patience. This one confirms it, and should at last bring her the wide audience she deserves.
The final chapter, which I will not spoil, takes place in Edwin's own home. It is eleven pages long and contains no dialogue at all. I read it twice on the train and a third time at home, sitting by the window, unwilling to close the book and return to the world. The Weight of Small Rooms is published by Farthing Row Press, and it is the quietest great novel of the year.
