If I were to summarize The Wheel of Fortune in one sentence, it would be Downton Abbey on Steroids. (And, yes, I realize that's a phrase and not a sentence.) You've got scandals, you've got forbidden romance, you've got bodies and butlers and wars galore. It's easy to imagine Julian Fellowes scratching out notes as he pored over Susan Howatch's tome on the manor life.
Howatch gives us the Godwin family with their lovely home of Oxmoon set deep in the Welsh countryside. Just as Mary would stop at nothing to have her family home, so too are the various Godwins possessed, driven to all manner of madness and ill-deeds by the pull of lovely Oxmoon. "Take me back to Oxmoon, the Oxmoon of our childhood" becomes a regular refrain throughout the years and generations. (Really, I must break this streak of multi-generational sagas!)
By shifting perspectives regularly - here a hundred pages from the perspective of Robert, there a hundred or so from Ginevra, and so on - Howatch also makes the reader think about the ways in which events are perceived by different members of a family, or even a husband and wife. Howatch provides a primer on how skeletons find their way into the closet, and occasionally back out, as well as the burdens of blood and birth.
The Wheel of Fortune is long.There's no question that it's well-written or has a plot that draws the reader in. Reading it, though, is definitely a commitment.
Three-and-a-half stars.
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