"All you should be" by Nicky Kemp

"All you should be" is a debut novel by a novelist who shares the same initials as her principal protagonist. Given that it is also told in chronological sequence (except, in this case, for the framing device of the discovery of the grandmother's body) and there is an abundance of detail which massively adds verisimilitude (but doesn't necessarily advance the story) I suspect this is a fictionalised memoir.

It is also a 'large canvas' novel, extending over thirty years and involving a large cast of characters. The temptation with such a novel is to fill it as full of incident as a Brueghel painting. This novel includes a rape and an attempted rape (and sexual abuse of a minor which is also rape) and several other incidents of sexual abuse as well as two adulterous conceptions. The disadvantage of having a lot of incident is that you can't cover every incident in detail, risking superficial treatment.

Similarly, the large cast of characters meant that few of them could be fully explored. Sometiumes I was a little confused about who was who. For me the most interestingly complex characters with unconventional character arcs were Sam the father, Doug the husband and (most of all) Ruth the mother. I would have loved to have spent more time exploring them.

One strategy of coping with a large canvas is to use lots of dramatically told scenes. But these require length (a good example of a large canvas multiple scene novel would be the famously long War and Peace). Too many short scenes and your narrative becomes fragmented. On more than one occasion I turned a page and found myself in a new scene and needed some time to work out the participants.

My favourite moments were these laugh out loud scenes: 

• first, in which Nina loses her virginity to to dubiously appropriate quoting of Macbeth; 
• second, when the second year discovers that sixth formers in school read dirty books. 

The novelist has a great turn of phrase and there were some memorable lines:

• "Their resulting stoicism and resilience were precarious and founded not on safe ground, but on quicksand."
• "Skunks would play Scrabble ... before she would ever read aloud her intimate observations."
• "What we leave behind tells our story ... and I want to be editor of mine."
• "He had known her long enough to be able to detect a hidden agenda in a pea soup fog."
• "Mia had seemed to overreact to that observation by scrutinising him at length, as if he were a rare museum exhibit."
• "Honesty can sometimes be the most selfish course of action."

The key to the appreciation of any book is whether the pages are turned. I read the book in a couple of evenings which is quick for me. It was a great first novel and I look forward to the next.

July 2019; 257 pages