Out now in paperback: Alys, Always

   

    Harriet Lane's superb novel Alys, Always is now out in paperback, and as it's one of my books of the year (I'll be posting the list soon), here again are my thoughts on it:

    When I picked up Alys, Always to write the 'first impressions' post the other day, I really hadn't intended to read on to the end there and then, but nor had I expected that just a few pages would be sufficient to make the book 'stick' so that it simply couldn't be put aside. To digress for a moment, I hope that a producer/director of taste and sensitivity will make a television film of this book because I think it would lend itself well to that treatment, and the result - taut, tense and beautifully played out - would be something worth watching.

    But to get back to the book itself, and to re-iterate briefly, Frances Thorpe is a sub-editor on a newspaper's books pages who happens upon a road accident and in going to the aid of the injured driver, hears her last words. What could have been routine subsequent contact with the dead woman's family in fact offers Frances an opening into a world of which, both personally and professionally, she is keen to be a part, and it is how she manoeuvres herself into a position whereby she can take advantage of the chance afforded her that is so compelling and so well done.

    This is a very concise and acute psychological study, at times drily funny ("Her mother is an interior designer. It slowly dawns on me that I've heard of her pioneering work with taupe."), always expertly observed, perfectly paced and smoothly finished off. At one point a visitor to Frances's flat, looking at the contents of the bookshelves, pulls out a copy of Rebecca; a significant moment, I felt, as surely this story pays homage to that book in more ways than one! You'll see what I mean when you read it, as I urge you to do, because this is such a neatly executed, well thought out piece of work, crafted in a different way from Vanessa Gebbie's The Coward's Tale, but to a similarly impressive standard.

    There are lines in which Harriet Lane has used rhythm, e.g. a comma providing a half-beat's pause, to such telling effect, and I love that attention to detail and that feel for how a story should be told. She is very amusing on the characters of literary London, the lionised figures (many with marvellous names), the fawning, the social cachet and the coin of celebrity. She is excellent, too, on things like dress and food and houses and the setting of scenes, and on laying clues to her main protagonist's true character in what amount to throwaway lines. All of these things come together to make a novel of skill, elegance and flair, one in which cool calculation and subtle manipulation move, as a cloud in front of the sun, to chill and unsettle, that suddenly cast shade revealing what in full light had been carefully concealed. What is not hidden is Harriet Lane's talent - this is a brilliant debut!