The Taxi Queue
Janet Davey
Vintage Dh58
A chance meeting at a railway station is the curiously old-fashioned catalyst for Janet Davey's third novel. In the first gloomy back-to-work days of the New Year, an unexpected snowfall brings London's public transport system grinding to a halt, forcing commuters to share cabs home. After an hour spent shuffling in the freezing gloom at Paddington station, Abe, a trendily dressed 20-something, slides into a cab beside Richard, a 40-ish suit carrying a corporate brolly. During the wait, Abe, who is gay, had clocked "a separateness" about him - something in his blandly handsome face that hinted at "a sense of loneliness, more or less under control."
Richard is a city accountant and a practising Christian, husband to the perfect, almost glamorous Vivienne, and the father of two thriving daughters. With his family away skiing, the "loneliness" that he has kept at bay for the past 20 years is about to come surging back into his life. One thing leads to another and Abe ends up spending the night at Richard's, leaving the older man questioning everything he has built his life upon.
When he was 21, Richard stumbled into an intense, ultimately tragic relationship with a man he met on the Oxford to London coach. Richard's father was big on not getting stuck in "phases", and on the rare occasions that Richard is assailed by memories of those torrid nights, he thinks of it as a phase. "Not everyone was in step, every step of the way, with the prevailing sexual freedoms. There was slippage between social history and personal history," Davey observes. It's in the space created by this slippage that the novel takes place, and hers is a talent perfectly suited to exploring such nebulous terrain.
Meanwhile, Abe has problems of his own, including debt and the tedium of a job in the marketing department of a health insurance company. He and his younger sister Kirsty share a house bequeathed to them by the father they barely knew, a photographer who took an era-defining picture of a girl leaning over Waterloo Bridge - maybe admiring the view, maybe on the verge of jumping. For her part, Kirsty is stuck in a lacklustre relationship with a sad Croatian refugee, failing to write the songs that she knows are within her. "There was a flavour to a song, at the back of her mind - serene and burnt at the edges, like a good day that carries on too long - but she couldn't give it life." These same fleeting flavours are what Davey captures so well. A Lebanese grocery store is full of "the smell of cold oranges", for example, and Abe's hair is "the colour of cassette tape", an image whose built-in obsolescence (how soon before there are readers who have no idea what shade that is?) only adds to its resonance.
There is tenderness in Davey's prose as well as precision - even Vivienne, so mockable seeming in her evangelical certainty, becomes sympathetic. The author works the same magic with dusty, overlooked corners of London, neighbourhoods like Kensal Rise and Harrow on the Hill, whose hopeful names merely highlight their unloveliness. In its themes of fragmented families and jumbled sexuality, of immigration and ennui, this is a thoroughly contemporary novel. At the same time, it recalls an older guard of English novelist whose ranks include Penelope Fitzgerald. The story's denouement occurs when Vivienne begins to fear that Richard is having an affair. She never suspects that the other woman might in fact be a man and the ensuing confrontation is anti-climactic yet gripping nonetheless, its impact rippling out across the remaining pages and into a deftly suggested future. It's a measure of Davey's success that she gets away with a poetic closing coincidence, ending on a note of quiet hope.
Fieldwork Mischa Berlinski Atlantic Dh88 A narrator who shares a name with the author and a plot dense with chunks of anthropological theory and missionary history - it may not sound a promising premise, but this offbeat whodunit is driven by an energy that is as compelling as it is inventive. Mischa Berlinski - the protagonist rather than the author - is a freelance journalist who follows his girlfriend from America to Thailand. A dedicated slacker, he is intent on doing as little work as he can get away with.
Then he hears on the expat grapevine of an American anthropologist who committed suicide in a Thai jail while serving a sentence for murder. Mischa is so intrigued that he forsakes his beloved naps and begins to investigate. The anthropologist, Martiya van de Leun, turns out to have been studying the Dyalo people, a tribe of northern Thailand. The Dyalo don't have words for love or luck, entrusting their fates to a host of fickle and often downright fearsome spirits. Martiya had spent years gaining the tribe's trust when along came the scion of a family of local missionaries, spreading the word of a far friendlier deity. A mischievous streak saves the novel from too much self-reverential tricksiness, and Berlinski also makes some wry parallels between missionary and anthropological zeal.
The Outcast Sadie Jones Vintage Dh58 This heady first novel is all about the warping effects of repression but it begins with a release: the year is 1957, and Lewis Aldridge is free having served two years in jail for arson. Still barely more than a boy, he has outgrown the clothes that are handed back to him. The story of how Lewis wound up in jail tracks back to 1945, when he was seven years old and his father returned from war. Peacetime brought its own challenges and his mother turned to drink, drowning in a swimming accident to which Lewis was the sole witness.
Marooned with his remote father and nice but clueless new stepmother, he crashed into adolescence and careened off the rails. Luckily, he has an ally. As a small girl, Kit Carmichael, the ugly-duckling daughter of the local bigwig, adored Lewis so much that she wanted to be him. Now that he's back from prison, she is determined to save him. Sadie Jones evokes a bygone world of silent children and tense dinners where the help hovers in the wings and the only words that are exchanged have to do with the passing of condiments.
Against this quietly menacing backdrop she tells a tale of transgression and redemption with echoes of Ian McEwan.
Wildwood Roger Deakin Penguin Dh58 It was over a decade ago that Roger Deakin set off on a unique voyage through Britain, travelling not by train or car or even foot, but instead swimming its lakes, tarns and rivers. Now comes a more global exploration, focusing on what he calls earth's "fifth element": wood. Taking the walnut tree in his Suffolk garden as his starting point, he journeys across Europe as far as Central Asia and Australia as he probes humankind's powerful connection with wood and trees. His own woody roots run deep: his mother's maiden name was Wood, "Greenwood" was his father's middle name, and his grandfather ran a wood yard. As he puts it, "I have sap in my veins". Along the way, Deakin encounters fellow woodlanders, hunting bushplums with Aboriginal women, searching for wild apple groves in Kazakhstan, and going coppicing back home.
Shakespeare sent his characters "into the greenwood to grow, learn and change", Jung declared trees an archetype in the collective unconscious, and the author finds his own arboreal wisdom in an account of boyhood rambles in the Forest of Dean. Deakin's death just four months after completing this book casts a faintly melancholy mist over its arboreal splendour, but what endures, beyond the sheer magic of the writing, is a powerfully argued call to conserve and enjoy.