Mary George of Allnorthover

SUSANNA RUSTIN
Financial Times April 14  2001

In a parched corner of south-east England, in a sweltering summer circa 1975, a teenage girl named Mary George goes about life in her village. She works in a hairdresser's on Saturdays, hangs out with her friend Billy, reels from a romantic encounter with glamorous Daniel, makes an ambivalent friend of bohemian Clara, and is rudely interrupted by her past.

Lavinia Greenlaw's composed and sensuous first novel is structured around this young woman's conflicting ties: to her home and the local girls she has known all her life; to her new, exotic art-school friends; to Billy; to Daniel; to her hippyish, indiscreet mother; to her chilly, absent father. Mary George moves forward and back, outward and in, as she looks for herself and who she wants to be, and her fragile, adolescent personality is this poet-turned-novelist's remarkable success. Simultaneously self- contained and all over the place, Mary George is likeable, diffident, vulnerable, confused.

Running not parallel to but underneath, around, bubbling up and through Mary George's story is that of Tom Hepple, newly returned to Allnorthover, but still suffering from psychiatric symptoms. At the beginning Tom sees what he believes to be a miracle and a sign - Mary walking on water - and is thereafter preoccupied with the fulfilment of some secret plan.

If Tom's mission, and Mary's part in it, constitute the crux of Greenlaw's plot, it is her sensitive concentration on character and setting that holds her reader's attention. Like Graham Swift and Rose Tremain, Greenlaw makes of rural south-east England a backward, unsettling, ghostly place. The Hepple family home lies at the bottom of a reservoir, an exile from which Tom has never recovered: "He'd felt his skin break then, an unbearable lack of edges." Back in Allnorthover, Tom hovers around the borders of sanity, where his profound instability, and the failure of others to apprehend it, is shrewdly and humanely described. In the over-charged atmosphere of the Chapel where he is staying, a radio supplies the ideal metaphor, both to him and to us: "The thing had leaked memories of times when it had been his head that had buzzed and crackled, as if badly tuned, when it had picked up what appeared to be fragments of different stations."

Yet while the mood of this story is sombre and oppressive, Greenlaw's wry evocation of an era and its entertainments lightens the overall effect. There is the Summer Fete, a tense, sweaty carnival of Victoria sponges, "stewed, lukewarm tea", tombola, and fancy dress: "The commuters turned out with their sulky, untidy children who had Victorian names. The adults spent a lot of money but they talked in shrieks and exclamations, and were sloppily dressed. 'Come in their gardening clothes,' observed Edna Lacey."

There is the multi-generational situation comedy of the Harvest Festival Disco, presided over by local DJ Terry Flux: "Several teenagers turned up early, skulking along the lane, trying to hide a tray covered with a teacloth or doily which they would shove into the hands of the nearest person at the hall before hurrying off to make a second entrance with their friends." And there is the melancholic spectacle of the English seaside, autumnal in every sense, where the wind "came slamming through the wide walkways, ripping off hats and tossing, rattling and loosening anything it could get in its grip - signs, posters, tiles, sweet wrappers, squashed cans, plastic bags."

On Saturday nights the girls stand at the bus shelter: "They smoked one cigarette after another, holding them against their palms and keeping a watch for grown-ups who knew them. They scrutinised each other's erupting bodies, the puppy fat, volatile skin and growing breasts." Socially awkward, self-conscious, thirsty and on edge, uneasily suspended between progress and decline, these adolescents and this England seem made for each other. I don't think I do the writer a disservice by suggesting she remembers it that way.