With a fitting surname for her new novel Expectation, the English author Anna Hope writes about three female friends whose aspirations, in their carefree 20s, fail to materialise in their 30s. A short summary of the book could read: shit got real. But this would not do justice to the compulsive and beautifully observed storytelling within Expectation. Writing about the liminal space between dreams and reality – and how failure affects relationships – Hope’s book is an ode to 21st century London and an examination of the pressures of modern society.
Billed as a Sally Rooney for women in their 30s, Hope is not quite as literary in her writing, but she has a similar way of delivering sharp, devastating insights in an almost nonchalant style. Dialogue is thoughtful and realistic throughout, with plenty of humour. The crucial similarity, for this reviewer at least, is in terms of character. Within a few short pages of Expectation, we come to feel as if we know the protagonists intimately and we root for them throughout the book, even as we watch them commit selfish, self-destructive acts.
A more pinpoint comparison is with the novels of David Nicholls, or Laura Barnett's debut The Versions of Us, both of which shift backwards and forwards in time in a way that Rooney does not. We first meet Hope's three friends – Hannah, Cate and Lissa – as spirited women of 29 living in an enviable three-storey Victorian townhouse which they landed by luck: "This is their life in 2004, in London Fields. They work hard. They go to the theatre. They go to galleries. They go to the gigs of friends' bands. They eat Vietnamese food in the restaurants on Mare Street."
Time then shifts to 2010, where each of the women is dealing with separate problems: Hannah and her husband Nathan’s IVF attempts; Lissa’s struggles as an actress; Cate’s move to Kent with a young child and new husband she’s barely known a year. From that point on the narrative moves between the women, to various points in their lives, ranging from 1987 to 2014. It is a simple and effective structure that gives the book an overwhelming sense of nostalgia and longing that’s mirrored in the action.
‘Simple electricity’
Desire is a central theme: Hannah’s wish for a baby; Cate’s memories of her former lover Lucy; Lissa’s willingness to pursue sex with the wrong men. “She is a battery that has been charged again. It is simple electricity – it is outside of morality. There is a dangerous, shimmering elation to the way she feels.”
Lissa’s decade-long struggle to make it in a ruthless acting world gives us some of the most vivid writing in the book. At 35, she’s had numerous near misses and her new role as Yelena in Uncle Vanya is make or break. From the difficult rehearsals, to the painful Meisner technique, to the arch commentary on reviews – “If a play goes on stage and the Guardian doesn’t review it, does the play really exist?” – the cutthroat world is ably rendered and the sense of time running out is clear: “Lately this beauty has come to seem a finite resource, one she must attend to, take better care of. And this care, it would appear, takes money, money she does not have.”
Hope’s background in drama – she studied at Oxford University and RADA – makes for vibrant fictional detail. Though Expectation is plugged by her publishers as her “contemporary fiction debut” it is actually her third novel. Her acclaimed historical fiction novels Wake and The Ballroom explore similar themes of complicated relationships, desire and loss.
Identity
That sense of loss in Expectation is most notable in Hannah’s storyline, a brutally honest and moving look at what IVF can do to a marriage. In pursuit of a much wanted child, Hannah takes an understandably hard-line approach: “Discipline. This is what she has always had, and this is what she has brought to bear on this situation. No caffeine. No alcohol.” Her husband Nathan, meanwhile, is at breaking point and the cracks, when they appear, go deep into the story in nuanced fissures.
The way that identity is forged through relationships is the central axis around which everything else in the book pivots. All three women have shifting feelings towards each other, realistic, in flux, in keeping with their own needs and the disappointments bitterly felt when they’re not met. In secondary school, Hannah and Cate’s rivalry helps to define who they are. In college, it is Lissa and her artistic mother Sarah who brings Hannah out of herself. In her characteristically insightful style, Hope tells us: “It is as though all along a part of her has been hard at work making a skin for herself in the dark and the silence, and now she is ready to wear it, to step into the light.”
