The Oversight
Will Eaves Picador, 258pp, £12
ISBN 0330481398
Will Eaves covers familiar first-novel terrain in this tale of growing up. School sports, sexual encounters, under-age drinking, problems with parents are all here, along with funny touches of Eighties detail in the chunky form of Pac-Man, and Star Wars.
A Victorian writing-box plays a prominent role. Bequeathed to Dan Rathbone by his father, the heirloom contains photographs and letters that seriously undermine young Dan's sense of family, friends and self. The novel follows his subsequent attempts to reconstruct the past.
Dan's parents are serio-comic delights. A hippie-painter, his father "wanted to smuggle an adder's nest into our home garden to control the local puppy population"; his mother, more conservative, has a taste for "boxed wine" and "like all transient liberals . . . harbours a longing for authenticity". Although the parents and their confused bohemian-bourgeois lifestyle are lovingly satirised, Eaves balances the laughs with the slow disclosure of infidelities, misunderstandings, truths that grow more burdensome for being concealed. Likewise, the school and university capers, which are more than a match for Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, are offset in tone by Dan's trembling first attempts at gay sex and his later concern over the contents of the writing-box. In well-weighted and meticulously observed prose, Eaves finds the right voice for each scene, whether frivolous or full of trepidation, with each mini-denouement delivering healthy doses of wisdom and wit.
However, there are problems with the set-piece format, which allows a quick gathering of insights and scenes, yet sometimes leads to confusion. As well as the flashbacks to Dan's student days, we are shown the parents' courtship. This may be intended as a stark contrast to Dan's gay fumblings in the dark, but it is not successful. Suddenly, there are too many characters, all of the same age, all looking for sex and stability, and Dan's parents are lost in the rush. You fear that the story may even turn into a version of the Michael J Fox film Back to the Future, with Dan appearing in one of the flashbacks and actually talking to his future mother and father. Mercifully, Eaves resists the temptation.
Another device that doesn't fulfil its promise is Dan's curious ability to see in the dark. This allows him (and the reader) to perceive all sorts of shenanigans in the sparsely lit basements of gay clubs, but as a metaphor of revelation, of seeing and not-seeing, of insight and oversight, his night vision seems more like a novelty than a convincing engine of the plot.
Yet this fine novel improves, as slowly more and more family secrets are leaked or conceded: for instance, Dan comes out to his parents when his father is battling with cancer. After his father's death, a close friend also dies, and Eaves's clear, calm writing conveys how mortality is often the urgent precursor to maturity, the death of someone close making us grow up very quickly. At the same time, Dan's questioning of his mother and his interpretation of the contents of the writing-box sadly unravel the ties that bind (and blind).
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