FICTION: The Clothes on Their BacksBy Linda Grant Virago, 293pp. £17.99.
The title of Linda Grant's absorbing new novel, The Clothes on Their Backs, is one of those expressions that evokes, in vivid shorthand, the desperation of forced immigration. Set in 1970s London, Hungarian émigrés, jeweller Ervin Kovacs and his wife, Berta, live a life of deliberate quietness in a red-brick mansion block with their daughter, Vivien.
"My parents brought me up to be a mouse," says Vivien, the bookish narrator. "Out of gratitude to England which gave them refuge, they chose to be mice-people."
Their very solitary daughter's only rebellion is not to follow her peers into high-waisted trousers and lurid tank-tops but to hunt out the vintage clothes shops around the Edgware Road, so that by the time she achieves her parents' dream of going to university, she arrives in a crepe de chine cocktail dress and "created an instant impression". Her dark looks soon attract science student Alexander, a vicar's son, who rather bluntly explains his attraction to her as being rooted in his father's instruction to bring some exotic blood into the increasingly pale Anglo-Saxon stuff running in the family's veins.
The marriage is tragically short-lived, as he dies on their honeymoon, and Vivien is soon back in her childhood bed in the mansion block, listless with grief and unable to imagine any sort of future for herself. All of this is painted by Grant as a richly imagined backstory to the central relationship in the novel - between Vivien and her uncle, Sándor Kovaks. It's through this relationship that the writer teases out difficult themes including identity, survival, immigration, and the lies that form the shaky bedrock of even the most blandly functioning family unit.
The most memorable event in a dull childhood ("my parents and I rolled slowly and quietly like three torpid marbles across the lino floor") was the acrimonious visit to the flat, when Vivien was 10, from her flamboyant, Jag- driving, leopard-print wearing Uncle Sándor. Up to the moment he knocked on their door, with a black teenage girlfriend in tow, she didn't know she had an uncle and once he had been ejected from the flat it was a state of ignorance her parents were quick to return to.
Grant, a former journalist, acknowledges that the character of Sándor Kovaks is inspired by Polish émigré Peter Rachman, the infamous slum landlord in London in the 1960s, who was jailed for exploiting his mostly West Indian tenants. Vivien engineers a meeting with Sándor when she becomes aware that the man she met in her parents' flat is the same as the one in the newspaper headlines, newly released from prison for racketeering and profiting from the misery of others.
Such is the skill of Grant's characterisations and the pull of the narrative that the quite incredible plot coincidences needed to bring them, and keep them, together don't jar and we are taken on an exploration of Sándor's life when Vivien presents herself not as his niece but as a young writer keen to write his biography. Now in much-reduced circumstances, the unsuspecting Sándor explains her parents' flight from Hungary, not to escape the Nazis (as she was always told) but rather to escape a rumour of sexual impropriety; he gives flesh to ancestors she never knew about and paints an idyllic, sophisticated pre-war life that was never described and never longed for by her parents.
Grant, a marvellously accessible and uplifting writer, who won the Orange Prize for her novel, When I Lived in Modern Times, lets Sándor, who had been captured and brutalised by the Nazis, explain his own cruel exploits as a landlord.
She lets his justification sound plausible in the framework of a society where immigrants have no option but to survive by whatever means they can. "The coloured people, West Indians, the ones they brought here to drive the buses and all that. Why did no one want to rent to them? Their money was the same colour as anyone else's money, no different . . . Prejudice. This is all there is to it."
Bernice Harrison is anIrish Times journalist