The sex turned out to be rather poor; her talents emerged as less than extraordinary; her financial prospects far bleaker than she had expected. For Tamsin Jarvis, a woman in her 20s in contemporary London, life is a series of small disappointments, each of them challenging her to reassess, or indeed establish, the woman she is, who she wants to be.
In her deeply impressive and accomplished first novel, Left of the Bang, Claire Lowdon charts the lives of a group of 20-somethings in London with sharpness and precision, with humour and insight, and with generous helpings of humanity. The novel is told in the third person and the central character, the above mentioned Tamsin, who is looking for love, fulfilment and maturity in all the wrong places.
Chapters shift in point of view, and the reader gains access to a group of young people brought together by circumstances, background and chance. There’s Tamsin’s boyfriend, the kind and hard-working Callum, who trades in his working-class background to teach at a posh school; Leah, Callum’s beautiful but troubled roommate, a calorie-counter who has yet to experience an orgasm; Chris, an army man on the brink of his first tour to Afghanistan; and, finally, and perhaps most poignantly, there is Sophie, a talented but vulnerable student, a girl of 12 who desperately wants to please and for her childhood self to remain intact.
Sense of foreboding
“Left of the bang” is a military expression for the lead-up, or build-up, to an explosion. The novel’s structure echoes its title; both reflect one of its primary themes: what comes before; what cause or causes there are; who is complicit; and the aftermath, of course. But above all, it’s the sense of imminent fate. The sense that something bad is about to happen. That something is about to explode.
This makes for a compelling read. Lowdon imbues the narrative with a strong sense of foreboding that is never overbearing. In the opening pages, a 12-year-old Tamsin witnesses her father kissing a woman who is not her mother. The incident impresses and unsettles Tamsin, instilling in her a strict sense of right and wrong, one she carries first into adolescence and then into young adulthood. This shapes her and defines her, and yet the events that unfold around her reveal that such moral fixity is not only premature, but a naive indulgence.
The novel leaps five years forward, when Tamsin meets Chris on the Tube, both young people unnerved by the sight of an abandoned suitcase in their carriage. This is post 7/7 London, and both anticipate that the suitcase could – at some point – explode. The suitcase does not, as it happens, but Tamsin returns home to a more domestic eruption, one with lasting consequences. And so moves the novel, each scene anticipating another tiny explosion, another blast to what the characters thought they knew, another difficulty in defining who they are.
There are shades of Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children – a group of younger adults grappling with their solidifying selves, the moral ambiguities – and compromises – of adulthood, the social manners of an almost elite set. And hints of Lena Dunham's Girls, too, in the book's depictions of sex and in how it so flawlessly captures these 20-somethings' expectations of what the world owes them, and the disappointments that flow from these misapprehensions.
Complexity
The interactions between characters reveal complexity and heighten sympathy. Tamsin struggles to determine whether her career and her love life are enough for her; whether she might find more excitement or fulfilment in the arms of Chris as opposed to Callum. This upsets her sense of right and wrong, and no character here is without fault, but all deserve some compassion (and readers may be screaming for them to develop this faculty themselves).
Left of the Bang focuses on the events of several months, but is bookended by childhood and adulthood: the novel's centrepieces revolve around nights out, hangovers and fumbling sex. The writing is razor-sharp, excruciating in its honesty and the rhythm of the scenes underlines the repetitiveness of early adulthood. And while in some ways the novel may appear traditional in form, it takes stylistic risks with voice, tense and point of view in early and late chapters. These pay off, absolutely, and tempted this reader, upon finishing, to begin again from page one. It is not surprising Lowdon has quickly made a name for herself as a fearless literary critic, and she is the assistant editor of Areté, the Oxford-based literary magazine. This reader gets the sense that Lowdon "the critic" read and revised the work of Lowdon "the novelist". The result is a piece of fiction that is flawless, beautifully paced and expertly judged.
At age 30, Lowdon has the flair, polish and insight of a firmly established novelist. Readers will find themselves in the hands of a gifted and perceptive writer, and when they manage to put Left of the Bang down, they'll be looking forward to what this fine novelist will do next. It's going to be good.
Sarah Bannan is the author of Weightless (Bloomsbury Circus)
