Family saga attains lofty sweep

“Alice in Exile” begins with such a modest reach, such quiet action, that its ambition might surprise you. At first, it seems to be a love story, one which will be confined to London in the year 1913, but soon the horizon opens up to Yorkshire and the English countryside and, many pages later, to France and Russia. One love story becomes two, and the world collapses under the weight of war and revolution.

Piers Paul Read’s engrossing novel is also a meditation on the Edwardian class system and a portrait of feudalism in pre-revolutionary Russia. Alice Fry is an independent and liberated young woman, who begins a liaison with Edward Cobb, a budding politician of Conservative stripe. Their affection is real and shared, and both pursue its course toward a marriage that both sets of parents would like to prevent. Alice’s father is a small-time publisher of political arcana and controversial subjects, and when it becomes clear that the marriage could be a political liability, her lover extricates himself from the engagement, without learning that Alice is pregnant. She too flees, agreeing to become a governess in Russia to the children of Baron Rettenberg at his estate, Soligorsk, outside St. Petersburg.

At Soligorsk, she makes a new life, gradually being accepted by Tatyana Andreiovna, the baron’s wife, and Olga Pavlovna, Rettenberg’s mother and matriarch of the family. She makes friends with the small but colorful family circle and even with one of the baron’s discarded lovers, the former governess, Vera.

The baron bides his time before setting his romantic sights on Alice, who gives birth to a son and begins to raise him as part of the Rettenbergs’ extended family. When the baron makes his move, she accepts his advances in word but not in deed. Family troubles, deaths, the coming of the Great War, then the eventual, inexorable revolution, with its horrors and deprivations, keep this love from being consummated.

When the family, Alice included, is forced to abandon the estate because of the revolution, Alice takes charge -- years of administering to the Rettenbergs have given her all the skills she needs -- and the shrinking group moves from place to place. Their life of wandering is hard, especially after so many years of comfort and plenty, but they continue to hope for an end to their roaming.

In the meantime, far from Alice, Cobb has made a disastrous marriage to a proper wife, divorced, gone to war in Belgium and Germany, performed acts of heroism and been awarded glory and medals.

Now, he has reenlisted in service because of a gnawing unhappiness somehow related to his long-ago jilting of Alice. A disgruntled but honored military officer, he wanders Europe and the Far East, having discovered some of Alice’s story. With this and the knowledge that he has a son, Cobb aggressively looks for them. The Rettenbergs, after many years of troubles and a burgeoning, melancholy toll of friends and family -- including the baron’s wife -- are now four surviving refugees: the baron, Alice, his daughter and her son. They arrive at their last stepping-off place from old Russia, the port of Novorossisk, where they hope to get out. The final pages of this tale -- beautifully and vividly told, grippingly paced -- are full of surprises, all credible if coincidental.

Read tells his story cogently but without shortcuts. He describes people, feelings, the wonders of nature and the intricacies of family life astutely, with nuance and sensibility. He is a joy to read, and one comes to the end of his tale with both fulfillment and sadness.