Fiction: Barbara Trapido's Frankie and Stankie has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and although it is unlikely to make the final six, it is an enjoyable low-key performance nonethless, writes Eileen Battersby.
Dinah is the second daughter of European parents who settle in South Africa. Father is a clever fellow, a maths professor who is secure in his understanding of the world about him. Loving mother is less confident; she remembers far too much about life in the Germany she fled. But Dinah is more concerned with the present and the future, most particularly her present, her future.
As for South Africa's story in the 1950s and 1960s, well, it's more backdrop than main event, although Dinah is well aware of the brutal racism.
South African-born but long domiciled in England, Barbara Trapido, light of touch, swift of foot, allows her narratives room to breathe and space to develop. A freewheeling spirit takes charge and she makes no judgments. Frankie and Stankie (not the most beautiful of titles, but never mind) is characteristically fresh and brisk. Dinah is no heroine: as a child she is a walking assortment of allergies and as a young woman she is preoccupied with frenetic friendships and wayward romances. The same material in the hands of Nadine Gordimer would acquire political weight, but Trapido is a storyteller, not a campaigner.
Told in a youthful third-person voice and continuous present tense, possibly as a deliberate distancing device, the narrative evokes a controlled urgency laced with irony and a sense of having a great deal to tell. As Trapido has made clear without a trace of coyness, this is an openly autobiographical novel but one without revelations. Largely filtered through a novelist's magpie approach to story, the effect settles in a neutral place somewhere between memoir and fiction.
The same lightness that graced her début in 1982, Brother of the More Famous Jack, endures. Trapido, however, is not a confessional heart-tugger; you are invited to enjoy the journey but don't expect to weep. At no time does this fast- moving girl's own story engage the emotions. Dinah is a follower, not a revolutionary. She lives without suffering, as will the reader.
From her earliest memories of life as a small child in the shadow of a prettier though slightly afflicted elder sister, Dinah, for all her self-absorption, exists. It is a story in free flow; there is no deep trauma, only deceptive vividness.
Mother is not sentimentalised - sentimentality appears to be alien to Trapido's fiction - but she is the character you want to know more about. She is the real heroine; Dinah, flighty and impressionable, is merely one of us.
Dinah's mum always thinks that an argument is the same as a fight. She's not really a talkie person, in spite of all the family stories. She likes reading books about plants and animals best, because plants and animals don't talk. She has a conservationist instinct long before it's in fashion and she gets very agitated about felled trees and whaling fleets. Whaling is an outrage to her and she passes on these feelings to the girls, so that the day Dinah's class gets taken on a school outing to visit the local whaling station it's a memorably horrible experience.
Clothes and fashion and the business of a schoolgirl becoming a young woman dominate. Dinah's interest in learning and books tends to fluctuate, depending on the intensity of whatever girlie friendship she is currently in thrall to.
In a narrative devoid of solemn intellectual earnestness it is a delight when Dinah's discovery of Jane Austen, which occurs while a teacher reads aloud, is described as follows:
Not one of the books quite throws at Dinah, as Pride and Prejudice does, how dialogue can lift and dance on points, how sentences can shine and crackle with a concentrated energy and a sharp crystal intelligence. So listening to Miss Barnes read it is like falling in love. It's like walking on air. It fills Dinah's mind with a new kind of music. Language is all the music she's never learned to play.
Frankie and Stankie is the first stage of a journey about how a girl becomes a woman, how she leaves the smells and light of one country for the dampness of another, and London in the 1960s. Perhaps what Trapido is really trying to tell us is that life goes on around us, not because of us. The final page of this enjoyably low-key performance - currently Booker longlisted but unlikely to make the final six - leaves one feeling that the rest of the story might yet be told.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Frankie and Stankie. By Barbara Trapido, Bloomsbury, 307pp, £16.99