A wide-ranging family saga, alternating family history with the bildungsroman of a girl growing up above a pet shop in "one of the ancient streets that cower beneath the looming dominance of York Minster" (Ch 1).
The main thrust of the novel is narrated by Ruby in the present tense and describes her childhood (it starts at the moment of her conception in what is presumably a deliberate reference to Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, an author cited two pages later) into adulthood within a dysfunctional family consisting of father George who has repeated affairs, mother Bunty who is eternally fed-up and particularly dislikes Ruby, clever but disaffected eldest sister Patricia, and permanently angry and violent elder sister Gillian. The extensions of the family - uncles and aunts and cousins and in-laws - are equally eccentric.
And so we embark on a roller-coaster ride from tragedy to comedy and back again. Ruby, as a little girl and the youngest of the family, never quite understands what's going on, particularly about the family secret that is dripped into the narrative. She's always one step behind and wondering why (she wonders about so many things, for example: "Why weren't we designed so that we can close our ears ...? Is there some way that I could accelerate my evolution and develop earlids?"; Ch 9)
There are moments of hilarity. My favourites were the Scottish holiday from hell featuring two couples and an adultery, and a nightmarish wedding on the day that England won the FIFA Men's World Cup.
The main narrative is interleaved with what are called footnotes (although they range from a page or two to chapter length) told in the omniscient past tense. These are episodes in the family history. If you encounter Tristram Shandy at the start, I guess you must expect digression. I presume this added material is designed to show that even the behaviours of Ruby's family have genetic roots: the common themes seem to be adultery, disappearance and death and the fundamental uselessness of most of the menfolk. However, I found these excursions distracted me from the main narrative.
They weren't necessary. Ruby is a delightful character with a strong voice and an always-entertaining family. In the end I wasn't sure if I had finished a comic novel or a family saga (back to Sterne) but I was certain that I had enjoyed myself.
Selected quotes:
- "Given free choice from the catalogue offered by the empire of dreams on her first night as my mother, Bunty has chosen dustbins." (Ch 1)
- "Bunty feels there's something indulgent about parks, something wasteful - holes in existence filled with nothing but air and light and birds." (Ch 1)
- "Bunty's attitude to pain, or indeed, emotion of any kind,is to behave as if it sprang from a personality disorder." (Ch 1)
- "She likes the word 'acquaintance'. It sounds posh and doesn't have all the time-consuming consequences of friendship." (Ch 1)
- "Her eyebrows have risen so far they seem to be hovering above her head." (Ch 6)
- "Monsieur Armand mumbled something to the effect that she would only be able to sell her body if her lips were sewn together." (Fn 9)
- "Patricia ... is sitting by the bedside with a kind of stunned look on her face as if the last thing she was expecting from a death-bed was death itself." (Ch 13)
- "Sandra has put on a lot of weight in the intervening years and is throwing most of it about." (Ch 13)
The book won the 1995 Whitbread Debut Novel Award
January 2025; 382 pages
- Originally published by Doubleday in 1995
- My Black Swan paperback was issued in 1996
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