Our Holiday by Louise Candlish – Review
By Helen Johnston
This drama about the conflict between rich holiday home owners and locals struggling to afford a place to live could not be more timely.
Protests by native Majorcans have hit the headlines in recent weeks, their fury aimed at an increasing number of homes being sold for holiday lets, pricing them out of the housing market and swamping their island with tourists.
Holiday hotspots in the UK have also become battlegrounds between local people unable to find anywhere affordable to buy or rent, while landlords turn to more lucrative Airbnb lets and some holiday homes stand empty for large parts of the year.
The increase in second homes which aren’t lived in full time has also been blamed for destroying communities as young people are forced to move away.
Louise Candlish handles this continuing confrontation brilliantly, exploring both sides of the debate through a fertile band of characters who ultimately find themselves swept up in a murder investigation.
The setting is Pine Ridge in Dorset where Londoners Perry and Charlotte have had a holiday home for 15 years at an idyllic spot overlooking the sea. So idyllic in fact that they built a summer house called The Nook on the cliff top, providing even better views and even more accommodation for themselves and son Benedict.
Their London friends Linus and Amy have now followed suit to become their Pine Ridge neighbours, doing up a ramshackle bungalow and installing their own copycat version of The Nook, calling it The Niche.
They are joined by their beautiful but troublesome teenage daughter Beattie and their son Huck, who brings along a French pal called Julien. Beattie is soon embroiled in a relationship with a local, while also hiding her criminal activities.
“Darker turn”
These two families, with their own share of secrets and lies, are supporters of the right to buy a second home wherever they choose and use it as little or as much as they wish. They justify this by believing that a holiday home is their reward for working hard.
Only Amy has any pang of conscience about it and she tries to get involved in the community by going to meetings about the issue.
On the other side are Pine Ridge bar man Tate and his girlfriend Ellie, who works in a hotel spa, who are living in a caravan because they can’t afford anywhere else. They support a movement protesting about second homes called Not Just For August (NJFA) led by Robbie Jevons. He and girlfriend Shannon also live in a caravan which they park in the garden of an empty holiday home for a time as part of their campaign.
The NJFA supporters carry out regular actions to highlight their plight, including throwing tomato soup on cars arriving by ferry, and forming a human chain in the sea so that drivers can’t disembark. All of which provokes anger in Perry, who is dealing with an illicit relationship as well.
But the dispute takes a much darker turn on the August bank holiday weekend when a summer house is pushed off the cliff, witnessed by hundreds of people attending a beach music festival.
Our Holiday is a fast-paced thriller, each chapter devoted to a different character, exploring their own private dilemmas within the overarching holiday homes issue. Nothing is straightforward for any of them as they spend August in what should be a holiday paradise but becomes a scene of tragedy.
Plans have already been put in place by the UK government to help councils control short term holiday lets by making them subject to the planning process. This will also help them to assess the impact on communities. Councillors are also being given the chance to increase council tax on second homes, with councils in Somerset, Devon and Norfolk already voting in favour of this.
Candlish doesn’t pretend to know the solution to the holiday homes issue, but her novel reminds us that the places where we go for our holiday are places other people have called home all their lives. And that’s something to ponder this summer.
‘Our Holiday’ by Louise Candlish is published by HarperCollins
