Natasha Lester fans rejoice, the prolific historical fiction author has released her latest novel, one that takes her in a new direction but retains the qualities her readers love. The Chateau on Sunset combines Natasha’s penchant for re-animating a past era in full-technicolour but moves out of the period she usually writes in, and across the ocean to Hollywood.
Instead of excavating the forgotten story of a heroic woman from history, Natasha has built a new story that fictionalises 1950s and ‘60s Hollywood and rests it on the foundations of Jane Eyre. The orphaned heroine is Aria Jones, and she, the modern iteration of Jane, has been transported from gothic England to the Chateau Marmont during the Hollywood studio era. This new setting is no less confining than 1800s rural England, and plenty of menace lurks behind the hotel’s many doors, from ghostly apparitions to sleazy film directors.
Natasha’s characters are undeniably contemporary. The young women who fill the Chateau fizz with ambition, potent beauty and unmet potential. Their stories are inspired by real stars who once graced the hotel, including Marilyn Monroe and Natalie Wood. Aspiring actresses Calliope (who cannot be called beautiful because the word is “wholly inadequate”) and Flitter, who is “chasing beauty but hasn’t caught it yet” are tools for Natasha to explore the treatment of women under the studio system, and to show how they used what meagre power they had to take control of their own fates. A teenage Aria is welcomed into their shared bedroom where she finds sisterly love and advice amid cosy pyjama-parties and mint juleps ordered from Schwab’s.
The Chateau itself is almost a character. It observes and sighs and welcomes Aria, who was orphaned at the age of 13 after her parents are killed in a gas station inferno. The reason she has come to the chateau is that it is where her aunt, the washed-up actress Miss Devine Rey, lives.
The narrative shifts back and forth between young, newly arrived Aria, and a more mature Aria who has taken on the role of being a sort-of governess to Adele, the daughter of the new owner of the Chateau, gruff rock star, Theo Winchester.
Like Edward Rochester, Theo has a history of excess, and a mysterious, checkered past. Though he’s more conventionally attractive than the original.
Natasha travelled to the real Chateau to research the book, and the story benefits from it.
The flicker of neon, the velvet furnishings, the lobby piano and the pool the guests gather around all combine to capture this legendary place that draws-in aspiring stars like moths to a flame, and inevitably burns most of them. Natasha recreates the Chateau’s glamour with no small amount of tarnish.
That being said, it wouldn’t be a Natasha Lester novel, if the author didn’t luxuriate in her love of fashion, and fans are treated to some lovely moments, from the feathered slippers given to Aria in payment from actress Judith Crown for her babysitting services, to her 1960s wedding outfit.
Aria’s goal in taking a job as Adele’s carer is to save enough money to one day break free of the Chateau. Just as Jane Eyre yearns to see the world beyond the English hillside, Aria dreams of the ocean. She is haunted by apparitions of fire, which foreshadows the inevitable fate of the building.
The Chateau on Sunset is not a re-telling, however, it is a re-imagining, and Natasha has allowed herself to create new fates for the characters. There is a distinct shift in tone after the famous woman-in-the-attic-scene, with plenty of surprises as the story barrels towards its ending.
Read the Q&A here.
We seek out the best stories. We nurture them. Then we share them. Hachette Australia is a team of expert publishers and passionate readers dedicated to discovering and supporting talented writers and working with them to craft exceptional stories.Â
