Book Review: The Ivy Tree

Title: The Ivy Tree

Author: Mary Stewart

Date: 1961

Publisher: Morrow

ISBN: none

Length: 223 pages

Quote: “I said, abruptly, and a good deal too loudly, “Look, you’re making a mistake! I don’t—” “Mistake! Don’t try and give me that!”…[H]e looked thoroughly dangerous. His astounding good looks, oddly enough, helped the impression.”

Mary Grey from Canada has no idea why, when she comes to Britain, she is immediately claimed as a long-lost friend by the astoundingly good-looking (to her) Irishman, or why he and his sister believe she could safely impersonate their runaway cousin to help them get their share of an estate. So she says. About halfway through this novel of topophilia and romantic suspense, as the narrator, she’ll tell us what she…knows, or learns, or remembers. Whatever.

The part of this story you’ll find easy to believe is that the author known as Mary Stewart loved the hilly, chilly strip of Britain known as the Border between England and Scotland, ancestral home of the breed of dogs known as Border Collies. There’s one of them in the first scene of this book, and some sheep, chickens, and a cat family, but the starring role for an animal goes to a horse.

Beyond that…I’ve read stories of the Border country that I liked better than this one; Joan Aiken’s If I Were You, in which a writer knowingly impersonates a distant relative just to get the chance to live and write there, leaps to mind. Whose relative Mary Grey turns out to be, in The Ivy Tree, is harder to suspend disbelief about. A story like hers is hard to tell in a way that has any credibility at all. For me, Stewart fails. I don’t mind novels where the narrator doesn’t know exactly what’s going on, at the beginning. It’s harder to like a novel where the narrator turns out to be a liar.

But it’s a nice, clean romance with lots of pretty scenery. Murder, fornication, and adultery are only hinted at, never explicitly presented in the present tense; apparently, despite several characters coming close, nobody actually commits any of them. After some perilous adventures, a happy ending is achieved with hardly even any profanity. Therefore some readers will like The Ivy Tree.