Love in a cold climate

House of Orphans
by Helen Dunmore
Fig Tree £17.99, pp330

Helen Dunmore has previously demonstrated a fascination with the way her characters' inner lives unfold in the shadow of turbulent historical events, and the ways in which relationships are strained or galvanised by political or military upheavals. House of Orphans, her ninth novel, takes place in Finland in the first years of the 20th century, as the Russian empire begins to exert greater control over the country, creating a groundswell of fierce nationalist feeling that becomes bound up in the greater unrest of the workers as it gains momentum across the Baltic states. Dunmore spent two years teaching English in Finland in her twenties, and here she conveys a passion for its icy landscape just as she did in The Siege (2001), set in Leningrad.

Far away from the tensions building in Helsinki, a recently widowed doctor, Thomas Eklund, tends his patients with compassion, his altruism aided by a private income that often allows him to waive payment for the poorest. These include the girls from the local orphanage, for whom Thomas's is the only kindness shown them in a hard, bitter life meant to prepare them for useful futures in service. When Thomas's oldest friend, Lotta, decides that it is unhealthy for him to live alone (he does not get on with his adult daughter, Minna, who rarely visits), he applies to the orphanage for a maid and is allocated Eeva, a beautiful, sullen girl in her mid-teens.

Eeva's presence begins to unsettle Thomas as he realises she is unlike the other peasant girls. Literate and self-contained, she rises in the night to read the copy of Pushkin given to her by her father, a revolutionary leader in Helsinki. Thomas soon falls in love with Eeva without learning her secrets.

This first part of the novel is marbled with longing, and Dunmore's great gift is the evocation of this peculiarly human ache, the sense of people marking time in their lives, yearning for what should have been or what might be. Eeva dreams of returning to Helsinki to find Lauri, the son of her father's closest comrade and the nearest she has to family; Thomas longs for Eeva's confidences even more than he desires her sexually; Lotta, crushed in a cold and childless marriage, busies herself with other people's lives but secretly loves Thomas.

Dunmore creates a beautiful sense of stillness, tight with anticipation, in this first half of the book; her careful descriptions of domestic detail imply meticulous research as food, landscape, plants and clothes are captured with her poet's feel for language. This organic picture of rural life is fractured in the second part of the novel, when Eeva returns to Helsinki and is reunited with Lauri, now involved with a group of political activists whose tactics are more extreme than their fathers'.

The life of the city crowds in as new characters are introduced. Eeva and Lauri become lovers at the same time as he is drawn into a plot to assassinate the Governor-General of Finland, but when Lauri is arrested, the only person Eeva can turn to for help is Thomas.

Some of the debates between Lauri and his comrades about the justifiable uses of terror force the modern parallels more than is necessary, and there is no neat resolution; history is often messy, Dunmore seems to be saying. But while this episode in Baltic history, little known to many British readers, is made vivid and exciting in Dunmore's retelling, the emotional intensity of the first half is diluted - proving, perhaps, that fear, betrayal and hope can be just as fierce in a kitchen as on the front line or in the corridors of power.