Literary awards are good for authors who make the grade, but not always for their readers: they can create a greater weight of expectation than the book can bear. Diana Evans’ third novel Ordinary People has, at the time of writing, been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, and longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. Does it keep these promises made on its behalf?
To begin with, the effects are mixed. There is a lot of backstory, and for the first quarter of the novel it feels as though it isn’t going anywhere. But even then, when the story is stuck in the past, Evans brings her characters out with verve and aplomb: we’re in the orbit of two couples in Bell Green, south London. Michael and Melissa have been together for 12 years and have two children; Stephanie and Damien have three.
The language Evans uses to introduce them and their world is casual, loose, glittering with detail and tossed-off characterisation. Here she is creating a grotesque of a midwife in one sentence: “She appeared as a fixture of a nightmare, white hairs flailing out of her hat, a pink, tired face with one eye higher than the other and a cruel walk, a careless stomping, as if in the many years of her midwifery she had used up all of her sympathy and now it was just plain old work.”
This line comes during one of the book’s terrific set-piece observational scenes as it describes in vivid colour the life stages of early parenthood: childbirth and the aftermath; the parent-and-baby community where “baby-beat” classes “could mean the difference between a grammar and a comprehensive”; the precious passages of downtime (“the nap was the holy land, the place of materialisation”) and the hell of soft play centres.
It also delivers a persuasive portrayal of middle-class life in multicultural Britain. Melissa, who is mixed race and remembers in her youth “brown boys who wanted something pale, and pale boys who wanted something brown”, doesn’t want her kids growing up in London but “somewhere calmer, somewhere greener, somewhere the emergency services were less busy”. Michael, who is of Jamaican descent, wants to stay in London rather than move to a place where they will be the only non-white family.
Race issues
As their story catches up with itself and starts to carry us forward, things thicken and become more interesting still. At the centre is a modern version of an old story; if literary fiction is sometimes derided as being all about adultery in north London, then here’s a novelty – adultery in south London. Race is a factor here too, as Michael’s affair with a white colleague means he discovers that “she could never know him completely because she had not lived as he had lived. […] He found himself having to explain things to her and not liking that he had to explain whereas with Melissa, or all the others before, they already knew those things and he didn’t have to tell them anything.”
The contemporary markers in the story reflect where black and white culture meet: the election of Barack Obama, the death of Michael Jackson. Damian and Stephanie work their way into this storyline too, though they’re less developed than Michael and Melissa and their story less urgent.
Sinister happenings
The energy and flow of Evans’ writing in describing contemporary life is one of the prime appeals of Ordinary People, a novel guided by its own soundtrack that’s available as a Spotify playlist. (The title comes from John Legend’s all-conquering 2004 song.) Occasionally exuberance overtakes sense and Evans’ desire not to use clichés makes the reader stumble: a reference to “an eight-and-a-half decade life”, mixed metaphors (“pegged along a mental washing line leading towards the final eclipse”) or a comic riff on a supermarket “a little smaller than Japan”.
But the characters and plot take over, and the climax of the story pulls it in an entirely unexpected direction of sinister happenings, mental imbalance and a parent’s worst nightmares. By this time, Michael and Melissa’s address – Paradise Row – begins to seem savagely ironic, and the book becomes multidimensional: a love story; a horror story; a page-turner.
In the end it’s the human story that wins the reader over and makes the plaudits seem deserved. Evans has said that in writing Ordinary People she was attempting something like Revolutionary Road “with more magnanimity towards women”. If her prose is more liberally applied than Yates’, then so is her empathy for her characters, and that’s a trade-off worth having.
