Mary George of Allnorthover
Lavinia Greenlaw Flamingo, 320pp, £12.99
ISBN 0007105959
There's something about Mary, the heroine of the poet Lavinia Greenlaw's first novel. A strange and beautiful creature, she has been seen to walk on water, no less. For mad Tom Heppel, come back to his home village of Allnorthover after ten years in care, she is a restoring angel who will make amends for the hurt of the past. But "the myth of Mary George" is at odds with the reality of this skinny 17-year-old girl, in cracked spectacles and outsized clothes. All poor Mary wants to do is hang out with her best mate, Billy, and daydream about a boy she met at a party.
Like several novels published this month, Mary George of Allnorthover is set in the 1970s. (It has something, too, of the flavour of Tim Pears's In the Place of Fallen Leaves and Christopher Hart's The Harvest, languorous coming-of-age first novels set in a disappearing rural England.) This coincidence shows a generation of writers not only looking back to their youth, but reflecting on a time of political uncertainty. Power strikes, petrol shortages and punk rockers: Greenlaw's Middle England is threatened by change and outside forces. A sinister shadow may darken the narrative, but for the inhabitants of Allnorthover, the danger lurks in the past - and from one of their own.
Ten years ago, Mary's father was the architect responsible for flooding the village "dip" to make a reservoir, casting out several families, including the Heppel brothers, and pushing young Tom, a "troubled but gifted 20-year-old", into insanity. The concrete lake, which swallowed all beneath it "like secrets", provides the watery mystery at the heart of the village and the novel. So this, then, is a deep and murky book.
The reservoir, however, is woefully inadequate in this summer of drought, of sharing bathwater and watering the garden with tea dregs. The sticky laziness of the heatwave intensifies the claustrophobia of the village and sometimes of the novel, too. Greenlaw strives to recreate the cobweb of a closed community in a confusing tangle of names, relationships and anecdotes.
Apart from their shared family history, Tom is drawn to Mary George because he recognises another outsider - torn between belonging and not fitting in. The roads of the nearest town create "a kind of static through which people got stuck", and both Tom and Mary feel "squeezed" out by the intimacy of Allnorthover.
Greenlaw writes in the elliptical, intensely detailed style of a poet - with whispers of the supernatural. Although, at times, the reader seems to be wading through excessive description, her poetic vision is strongest in the scenes of village life. Saturday night in a small town, the village fete and local disco are all affectionately made real. Despite the impossibly twee place names and occasional anachronisms, she just about avoids quaintness. The timelessness of the countryside is set against the flux of urban fashions and Seventies pop music.
In a rather overfamiliar combination, Greenlaw aligns her convincing portrayal of provincial adolescence with a darker subplot of stalking, incest and even murder. But the whimsical figure of Mary George isn't substantial enough to unite both storylines, and Tom never becomes much more than his reputation as a "monster" or "loony". The laboured excavation of the past seems as unnatural as the reservoir itself. Mary George is a strong but strangely lifeless first novel.
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