If writing from the North is experiencing a boom, author Laura McVeigh exemplifies the breadth of talent that’s emerging. Her first novel, Under the Almond Tree (Two Roads, 2017), told of a family aboard the Trans-Siberian Express, fleeing conflict in 1990s Afghanistan. In similarly ambitious fashion, her second novel, Lenny, is set between Louisiana, 2012, and the Ubari desert, 2011, and tells of a neglected 10 year old in a bayou town, and a pilot during the first Libyan civil war. It’s strange in the best of ways, taking in themes of environmental destruction, human conflict, home, memory, time, space and reality, without feeling hectic.
The Little Prince is referenced throughout and, as with that French classic, the child protagonist provides an ideal vantage point from which to examine the world. Lenny’s mixture of pragmatism, innocence and resilience, in bas-relief against a society that repeatedly lets him down, pulls on our heart strings. His mother abandons him. His father, returned from war, can’t cope. The banks repossess his house (yet leave it uninhabited). Nearby chemical companies allow waste to pollute his town, resulting in illness, emigration and a sinkhole that threatens to swallow everything.
Overcoming injustice
“Don’t sink”, goes the basic narrative thrust. Lenny must survive against the odds. His father must pull himself out of his personal sinkhole and learn responsibility. The townspeople must save their home. But though it verges on becoming a cheesy fable about ordinary people overcoming injustice, the book is more nuanced than that.
A year previously, in the Ubari desert, a pilot falls from the sky, loses his memory, and ends up being cared for by a group of nomads. He knows not who he is, and is gradually transformed by those around him. But the slow return of what he knows, and an ever-encroaching search party, threaten his new sanctuary.
These stories converge in unexpected ways, their apparently contrasting worlds looking increasingly similar as we proceed. Though it wobbles in places (it feels a little implausible when “intuition” sets characters on a fruitful course of action, for example), what’s impressive about the book is its structural inventiveness. It shapeshifts and time warps, bringing into question our understanding of narrative, space, time. The overall feeling, as well as a theme running through it, is that of a return to innocence. We proceed blindly onwards, and the universe opens out into what it always was: something infinite and strange.
