The Tea House on Mulberry Street – Sharon Owens

Daniel and Penny Stanley have run the teahouse on Mulberry Street since they were first married, and though Penny scours glossy magazines for ideas on decorating, Muldoon’s Tea Rooms is unchanged from the days her parents ran it. Every morning Daniel makes the cakes and scones and light meals that keep Belfast citizens coming in, and the little shop connects a widely disparate group of people. There are the Crawley sisters, charity fund-raising spinsters who have a somewhat jaundiced view of the world and a high regard for the Queen; Brenda Brown, an unsuccessful artist convinced that she’d get the recognition her work deserves if only she had a better name and was from another town, who writes unsent letters of admiration in gold pen on red paper to her idol, actor Nicholas Cage; housewife Sadie Smith escapes from her loveless marriage to conservatory salesman Arnold, and his determination she ceaselessly diet, by diving into Daniel’s superlative cheesecake; and successful ex-pat and magazine editor Clare Fitzgerald hopes to find her lost love, Peter, in the tea rooms where she first fell in love with him. In the mentime retiree Henry Blackstaff’s beloved garden is being taken over by wife Aurora’s plans to extend her Brontë Bunch reading group by building a huge conservatory – perhaps his Uncle Bertie’s monkeypuzzle tree will have to be felled, and all his carefully tended plants moved, but surely he wouldn’t begrudge her this for the sake of a few old twigs! Besides, the BBC might be going to film a documentary.
Although complicated, intricate and intertwining, I warmed not at all to this Irish tale of frustration and dissatisfaction. Though it ends satisfactorily enough, with resolution for all and just punushment for the few genuinely unpleasant characters, the unceasing misery of so many people was exhausting. Not only that, but not a single one was prepared to change their lives themselves, despite their deep unhappiness, and change comes only when the decision is made for them. Sadie, for example, is clearly miserable in her marriage, but instead of addressing it she drowns her sorrows in cheesecake until she by chance sees Arnold with a glamorous woman unmistakably his mistress.
The motivation is often simplistic (Daniel, abandoned by his glamorous, feckless mother, was raised by a dour aunt who was only ever interested in saving money and watching every penny, so he is unwilling to spend on anything unnecessary or frivolous), and none of the characters rang true for me. I found The Tea House on Mulberry Street both too complicated and heavily peopled, and too superficial and miserable to enjoy, though I did read it to the end. - Alex