Tracy Chevalier's novel, Falling Angels, opens on New Year's Day, 1901 as Kitty Coleman, the narrator of its first fragment, wakes up with a strange man in her bed. She is a guest at a fun weekend in a country house. Due to lack of interest on the part of Kitty this is all we learn about the situation. Her husband, Richard, has even less to say about himself.
For a novel which unfolds through a group of characters, all using first person narrative, this is a drawback.
"I kept my eyes closed and it wasn't so bad", Kitty tells us in November1903 as she recalls a traumatic "payment in the flesh" extorted by an unscrupulous doctor for contraceptive advice.
Their daughter, Maude, and her friend Lavinia Waterhouse are the central voices in this tale which is set entirely in the Edwardian era.
Maude is clever, homely and interested in practical matters. Lavinia is a spoilt beauty and rules the roost in her hard-pressed parents' house. When the novel begins the girls are five years old.
This is a saga of a world in waiting, much of it spent in or around a London graveyard. The title, Falling Angels, refers to its special line in grave ornaments. The girls are befriended by the gravedigger's son, Simon Field, who quickly ingratiates himself into the Coleman household. He knows what Kitty Coleman has been up to with Mr Jackson, the owner of the cemetery.
When we reach October 1906, Kitty is saved from depression by Lavinia's mother, Gertrude Waterhouse, who inadvertently introduces her to the suffragette movement. Soon afterwards Simon tells Lavinia, who allows him to kiss her in a freshly dug grave, about Kitty's liaison and Mr Jackson.
The last sections of the novel are concerned with Kitty's increasing involvement with the suffragettes and its effect on those around her. This is negative and, in one case, indirectly brings about a horrific tragedy which is quickly passed over.
Tracy Chevalier is clearly an emerging talent. Her last novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring, was a delight. Its narrator, the girl in Vermeer's magical painting, a marvel of poignant understatement.
It is a pity that the author did not get an equally distinctive voice to tackle the big issues touched on in Falling Angels. "That silly girl," says the Coleman's housekeeper, "trying to stir things up" as she throws Lavinia's anonymous note about Kitty onto the fire.
But Lavinia with her obsessions and lists, her self-importance and her precocious amorality is the stuff of black comedy.
Her constant witness is what this novel, which contains too much chop and change, needs.
Emma Cooke is a writer and critic
