We're in Woolworth's. I mean, back when Woolworth's was a thing, and therefore being in one was a thing you might possibly do. That actually only rules out dates later than about 2008, but we're much earlier here; in fact we're in 1944, during the Second World War. And here are our five main characters: Jo, Val, Ben, Alec and Vern, all small children aged about five. But why have we chosen this moment to meet them? Well, something significant is about to happen, but we'll circle back to it at the end, if you don't mind.
So now we commence a series of flash-forwards, first by five years to 1949, and then in a series of fifteen-year jumps to 1964, 1979, 1994 and finally 2009, when each of the main cast of characters is around seventy. All five start out in the (fictional) London borough of Bexford but then take different paths through life.
Alec goes from wise-cracking schoolkid to cocky twentysomething looking for a break in the newspaper business, which he gets as a typesetter. His natural bolshiness and interest in left-wing politics also make him ideal as a union representative. The fact that his job is in jeopardy by the late 1970s isn't any reflection on his skill at it, but just a reflection of the changing times and the development of computers that will eventually make his entire job obsolete. Alec fights against the inevitable, and leads his colleagues in a lengthy strike, but eventually finds himself out of a job and takes a swerve into the teaching profession.
Vern, a big, ungainly kid, matures into a big, formidable adult making a slightly dodgy living in the property rental business and nursing a slightly incongruous love for opera on the quiet when no-one else is listening. Eventually the business climate takes a downturn and he is back to square one (not to mention being booted out on the street by his wife), but gradually puts his business back together so successfully that he's able to afford lavish trips to indulge his love of opera; the full black tie and quail's eggs extravaganza. But a change of fortune is always just round the corner, and if you spend your life pissing everyone off in pursuit of your aims, including your own family, you may find that they are disinclined to help out when you really need them.
Jo and Val, the twins, take different paths through life: Val falls in with a group of ne'er-do-wells led by the charismatic Mike, whose slightly cool and exciting rocker rebelliousness has by the late 1970s curdled into skinhead ultra-nationalism. But at least if he slakes his thirst for a bit of the old ultraviolence out on the streets then he won't feel the need to come home and take it out on the missus, right? Eventually the inevitable happens and Mike administers a beating to a young Asian bloke that tips over into murder and he gets put away for a long stretch. After Mike eventually dies in prison Val gets a job as a volunteer for the Samaritans, dispensing some of her hard-earned life experience. Meanwhile Jo has spent an entertaining couple of decades in California as musical sidekick and occasional lover to Ricky, a fellow Londoner who has become a proper massive rock star. Eventually that comes to an end, as all things do, and she returns to England and a job as a teacher in a secondary school.
Finally there's Ben, already by his twenties in the grip of some fairly serious mental illness and on a pretty heavy prescribed drug regime. a few years later and he appears to be off the prescription drugs but self-medicating fairly heavily with brain-numbing quantities of weed while just about holding down a job as a bus conductor. After another fifteen years his life appears to have taken a miraculous turn for the better after a chance meeting with Martha, the Nigerian proprietor of a café where he's got a part-time job - she straightens him out by marching him off to the GP for a proper prescription of anti-depressants, and once he's sorted out in the old noggin department promotes him to full-time employee and eventually husband.
So by the last instalment in 2009 everyone's had their fair share of triumph and disaster, marriage and divorce, birth and death, tears and laughter, light and shade, etc. Has anyone changed the world, become Prime Minister, found a cure for athlete's foot or anything like that? Well, no, but who is to judge the value of an individual life? And who knows what small barely-noticeable ripple that one of us might make during our time here might eventually accumulate into something momentous after we've gone?
Well, I hope you're comfy on that rug, because prepare to have it pulled from under you: the event described in the first chapter is the V2 rocket impact on Woolworth's in New Cross in November 1944 in which 168 people died, including many children. In the fictionalised version of it that features our five protagonists, they are all, with various parents, directly under the point of impact and it is made very clear that they are all pretty much vaporised into their component molecules by the ensuing blast. So what follows is a possible alternative future if some part of the preceding few minutes had played out differently and the rocket's trajectory had altered by a fraction of a degree and it had pancaked harmlessly into the Thames, or possibly slaughtered a different 168 people in a different building.
So how do we feel about this? We'll have to be self-aware enough to realise that any responses like "well, that's rubbish then, none of it was real" are a bit problematic; after all, none of it was real anyway, it's a novel, literally made up by someone. I think my problems with it, to the extent that I have any, are as follows: firstly, if you skip the first chapter what you have left is an interesting but not wholly remarkable set of occasionally intertwining stories about five kids from London and their various adventures in life. That's fine, but pasting the framing device on the front almost looks like an attempt to imbue the stories that follow with a sort of poignancy and significance that they haven't really earned. Secondly (and this is really just the first criticism again in a slightly different form), the first chapter is so brilliantly written, with its Nicholson Baker-esque slowing of time to a nanosecond crawl to describe the rocket's arrival through the roof of the building and the impossibly violent chemical reaction happening inside it, that it raises expectations that the rest of the book can't possibly live up to. The other example that springs to mind of an opening chapter so perfect that the rest of the book was a bit of a let-down in comparison is Ian McEwan's Enduring Love.
To be clear, there's absolutely nothing wrong with this, but it just felt to me like the structure didn't quite knit together properly, or, to put it another way, the carrot of something bold and structurally experimental was dangled and then never quite followed through on. It is worth pointing out that quite a lot of people disagreed with me, though.
A couple of footnotes: some of the fragility-and-preciousness-of-life stuff, particularly towards the end, is fairly explicitly Goddy, but not in a way that I found annoying, or perhaps my mild annoyance at the book's structure distracted me. The other thing that struck me was how similar Ben's intrusive thoughts were - particularly during his weed-addled on-the-buses episode - to the borderline personality disorder stuff described by Joe Tracini in his various videos and books.
