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I really wanted to like it. It starts so well. Ten-year-old Grace narrates; she’s an only child who thinks a lot. Sometimes her narration feels more like that of an adult, but she’s also quite naive at times, and it works well that we see the people in her street and their activities through her eyes. The book is set in the UK, somewhere in the Midlands, in the summer of 1976. People regularly complain about the heat, which is realistic for typical Brits. And I remember that summer well.
Some of the writing, too, is almost poetic. The author uses similes and turns of phrase that work beautifully as she describes ‘The Avenue’ - a short cul-de-sac where Grace lives with her parents. There’s a useful diagram at the front of the book listing the eight houses and their occupants, although when the story starts number 14 is empty.
One of the houses, number 11, is the only odd numbered house and it sits a little way back from the others. Its occupant is the reclusive Walter Bishop, a man who keeps to himself and who is ostracised by the other adults in the street. We soon learn that they believe he kidnapped a baby nine years earlier. We also learn that there are odd circumstances surrounding a house fire that happened when his elderly mother was staying. Unfortunately she was unable to get out.
The novel opens with mention of someone else: Mrs Creasy, who has disappeared. Margaret Creasy lives at number 8 with her husband John, who is somewhat obsessive-compulsive. He’s disturbed that she has gone but certain she is alive. Every day he meets the bus at the end of the avenue, in case she’s arriving back.
Grace has a friend called Tilly, who has some unspecified illness that makes her frail. Something to do with her blood, but we never learn what it is. Tilly follows Grace around, and they decide they’re going to do some investigating. They want to find clues about Mrs Creasy’s disappearance. And they also want to find God…
The story has so much potential, with supposedly quirky characters, but unfortunately they all seem rather two-dimensional. I was glad of the map because it reminded me who was whom and which couples went together - and it’s not as if it’s a huge cast. By the end I could remember most of them. There’s ‘thin Brian’ (who is 43) and his hypochondriac mother May, for instance. There’s Mr Forbes who’s rather a bully, and treats his wife Dorothy as if she’s a not very intelligent servant. He goes off to the pub leaving her with lengthy lists, assuring her that unless she writes everything down she won’t remember what to do. If her list runs out, he adds more to it.
Grace’s parents are called Sylvia and Derek but they don’t have much of a part in the novel, other than as part of Grace’s home. And there’s a single mother called Sheila who has two children: 16-year-old Lisa and the much younger Keithie. I had to check the list for the final resident - Eric Lamb. He lives alone after his wife died, but he feels like an extremely shadowy character, even more so than the others. Then there’s a lady who doesn’t live in the avenue who sometimes looks after Grace and Tilly. And the vicar.
The book moves slowly forward in time in July 1976, with a few flashback sections in 1967 when the events that everyone whispers about actually happened. It’s nicely done and works well, with most of the same people. It turns out that most of them have secrets of some kind which come to light during the course of the book, although some of them are not really relevant to the story.
I was also mystified as to why another couple was introduced late in the book, moving into the empty house. They're a couple of Indian origin who have moved from Birmingham. They're good humoured and friendly, but are met with a barrage of tactless questions from people who are remarkably narrow-minded and insist on stereotyping them. They don't seem to have any part in the plot.
And that's really my problem with this book. I’m not sure what the story is. It seems like it might be a whodunit, but nothing is ever uncovered. It becomes a bit slow-moving in the middle; perhaps this reflects the torpor that accompanied the summer of 1976. But it meant that I couldn’t read more than a few chapters at a time without my mind wandering. At the start I was eager to know what had happened to Mrs Creasy at first… by the end I didn’t much care. Which is just as well, as we never do learn why she left or where she went.
There’s a theme that comes up more than once, about not being judgemental. Walter is constantly judged and condemned by his neighbours, although he continues to live there - and it’s clear that those judging him are themselves full of secrets that they don’t want to be uncovered. But it all feels a bit forced, with a bizarre section towards the end where Tilly thinks she sees Jesus in an oil stain on a large drainpipe. She manages to convince everyone in the street that it really is Jesus although not everyone agrees.
The message about God being everywhere is mentioned many times, as is the idea that people are not divided into goats and sheep, but that everyone has some good and some bad in them. And there are lots of realistic references to things we took for granted in the mid-1970s so it’s good from a social history point of view. Indeed, there’s lots to like about this book...
And yet, I came away from it feeling as if I didn’t care about any of the people. I'm not going to remember any of them in a few days' time. I didn’t really know what the point of the book was, and I was (in a low-key way) disappointed not to know what actually happened to Mrs Creasy.
However, don’t necessarily trust me on this. Reviews elsewhere are mostly very positive. As a study in 1970s suburban England with beautiful turns of phrase, it does a good job. But, personally, I prefer three-dimensional characters and more of a resolution.
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