Fiction: 'I like things to be light and oblique", Lavinia Greenlaw said in a 1997 interview for Thumbscrew magazine, and "light and oblique" is a sizeable part of what we get in this engaging and serious novel.
Greenlaw is one of a small number of people who successfully work in both prose and poetry, and on that occasion she was talking about her poetry. As is often the case though, there's a strong symbiotic relationship between the two. We tend to erect artificial barriers between different forms of writing, forgetting that they are all built on the same foundations - words, ideas, lives.
An Irresponsible Age is set in central London - the Docklands development and south of the Thames to Battersea and environs - at the time of the Canary Wharf bomb, and could be read as a kind of anti-Saturday, Ian McEwan's Bloomsbury novel. But whereas McEwan's characters lead comfortable middle-class lives temporarily disturbed by violence, Greenlaw's are outsiders struggling to make sense of the margins. Anomie is their state of being; illness and disability, explosions and accidents, construction and demolition are significant metaphors. There are no comfortable families, no unsullied relationships, no beautiful houses and elegant meals.
But merely to set An Irresponsible Age against McEwan's book would be to do it a disservice. It has much more to offer than that. It is a subtle portrait of shapeless lives lived in unfinished places. Juliet Clough, the heroine, is a human being "under construction" but also secretly marked for demolition. That she lives in an inner-city housing collective and works in a new art gallery in the Docklands is an apt and unnerving dichotomy.
Something is solidifying and weakening in Juliet, there is pain and too much blood and an inability to connect with things and people, and this illness is a kind of organising metaphor, an edifice within the bounds of which her life unfolds. The building metaphors are not accidental - her innards are full of "pieces of glass and stone". In the end the thing that is killing her literally explodes, and the shock and disintegration, equivalent to the explosion of Canary Wharf in an earlier chapter, allows for clarification and insight, and propels her into a new approach to life. It's the closest Juliet comes to happiness - that temporary lucidity.
The thrust of the book could be summed up by a line from Greenlaw's poem, Guidebooks to the Alhambra: "things change, become home and we must leave them". At one point one of the characters asks "Where are our parents?" The formality of the question is arresting. It is as though the necessary construction of their lives has been suspended arbitrarily, leaving absences, separations and partings with more force than relationships or love.
Those who seek a simple narrative path, sympathetic characters and redemptive endings should look elsewhere. This book is much too good to be loaded on to that leaky barge. Greenlaw is a cool clear writer, and An Irresponsible Age is a piece of ice in the eye, chilling and disturbing, a beautiful portrait of ordinary unhappiness at its best.
William Wall's most recent novel is This Is The Country
An Irresponsible Age By Lavinia Greenlaw Fourth Estate, 328pp. £16.99