Mary George of Allnorthover

Independent 6th April 2001

Normally, the news that a distinguished poet has settled down to produce a novel sets off a kind of klaxon alarm in the mind of the critic. One remembers the torrent of overblown imagery that Jeremy Reed brought to his fictional recreations of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, or the elliptical bafflement of the late George Macbeth's fiction. Happily, Lavinia Greenlaw's début is light on the purple patch, and apart from a few highly effective flourishes in which the heroine balances on a lofted bough across the surface of a reservoir (the novel's key symbolic moment), the result is agreeably prosaic.

Mary George of Allnorthover follows a locational line taken up by several successful recent English novels ­ Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club, for instance, or Christopher Hart's The Harvest ­ by being set not in the tarmacked Gehennas of London W11 but out in the provincial boondocks. "Allnorthover", an Essex village not far from "Camptown", looks as if it lies somewhere off the A13 between Shoeburyness and Thorpe le Soken. Here a close-knit, bygone way of life narrowly survives, measured out in a series of ritualised assemblies: church fête, bonfire night, harvest festival disco. All this is minutely, unobtrusively evoked.

Enigmatic Mary George, a pallid late teen who spends a lot of time trying on odd clothes to the accompaniment of Velvet Underground records (Lavinia Greenlaw has a shrewd eye for 1970s musical fashions), stands somewhere between two competing and sometimes sharply opposed ways of life. Half of her is happy to spend long hours smoking dope with her chum Billy athwart the latter's grandpaternal gravestone; the other half is enticed and puzzled by the stylish and snobbish doctor's daughter, Clara, and her art-school friends. A Saturday job in the local hairdressing salon, where the stylists trade scandal beneath the sound of the dryers, is balanced by the thought of "college" rolling seductively across the horizon.

Battened down and introverted, Allnorthover is dominated by family ties, frequently to the point of strangulation. The novel opens with the return from years of (unsuccessful) psychiatric treatment of Tom Hepple, whose mother's relationship with Mary's absent architect father lies at the heart of nearly everything that follows. Predictably, the meeting between Tom and Mary, fixed up by a well-meaning local woman who imagines that some mental resolution can be achieved, doesn't go as planned. From here it is a short psychological route-march to the violent and fiery finale.

This delight in predestination is Lavinia Greenlaw's most singular failing. While many of the relationships conducted under the dead East Anglian sky are sketched out with neat ambiguity, the major foreshadowing ­ that mad Tom is going to do something very nasty ­ can be glimpsed as soon as he first slouches along the village street. Similarly, no one who reads the paragraph about Kevin Lacey and his boozed-up moonlit drives will be altogether surprised by the later roadside carnage.

Mary George of Allnorthover is full of good things. One gets a genuine sense of how life was lived out in the Essex back-lanes in the summer of drought and punk rock. A little extra dynamism ­ unexpectedness, resonance ­ would have made it better still.