The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life

William Nicholson

Quercus,€23.39

THE godmother of this compulsively readable novel is George Eliot, whose Middlemarch supplies its epigraph. Like Middlemarch, Nicholson presents a kaleidoscopic picture of English village life.

The story takes place in Sussex below the South Downs, over a period of six days in May, 2000. The cast covers a spectrum of more-or-less wealthy middle-class characters, people who live in tastefully converted farmhouses, drive gleaming 4x4s, and commute to work in London so their children can go to private schools.

The novel opens as Laura, mother of two young children, happily married to vague, amiable Henry, receives a letter from the lover who abandoned her when she was 20, and wants to meet again. Laura intuitively decides not to tell Henry the whole truth, a deception which sets her wondering just how happy her marriage really is. Meanwhile, Liz Dickinson, a journalist and single parent, travels to work in London, knowing that lunch with the father of her daughter, Alice, may lead to something more, and regretting her inability to resist his advances. Liz’s unpleasant mother has a drama of her own when her beloved poodle is found dead in a field where he has been chasing sheep. The killer is an eccentric known to the local prep-school boys as ‘the Dogman’, in fact a kind man, driven half-mad by his efforts to farm in country that has turned into suburbia. The rector, the compassionate 68-year-old Miles Salmon, whose mild manner conceals the intelligence with which he has come to terms with his loss of faith, is the most original of all.

There is a serious concern with the sense of quiet desperation with which people live their apparently ordinary lives, which saves the novel from being merely a light-hearted romp.