189 pages, Mariner Books
Review by Marc Nash
"Alison Wonderland" is a slyly
subversive book. Therefore depending on a reader's preconceptions, they will
either delight in it like me or I suspect, the other pole of response is to be
somewhat baffled by it.
Alison Temple is also known as Alison Wonderland.
She attempts to reinvent herself after discovering her spouse is unfaithful to
her. But you can only change certain superficial things about your personality,
not your deepest inner core. Alison operates on two levels, the confident,
professional private investigator (cases of marital infidelity and politically
sensitive industrial espionage); and the inner city single girl to whom things
happen rather than her driving events forward in a search for love and
fulfilment.
Part of the novel is a love letter to
London. A dualistic wonderland in and below the level of vision and
comprehension. Dark forces are at work, forces that invade her personal life
and lead her to go on the run in a very sedate road trip to Weymouth, fuelled
by sweets and chocolates from Woolworths and roadside garages. A road trip
undertaken with her best friend Taron, a sexy Clubber and girl about London
town, but behind which is a romantic, off-kilter spiritual woman who is also a
pathological liar and fantasist. If Alison herself is a character the author
has reined in, Taron is a freewheeling, wildly comic invention. The two spark
off one another perfectly, Taron in her madcap schemes such as seeking to find
an abandoned newborn to offer as a gift to her witch mother to help her failing
powers, Alison all practicalities of how to care for it with nappies and milk
and consequent musings on her own love life and future progeny. These two
single girls pursuing a night out in a Weymouth club is perhaps the highlight
set-piece scene in the book. An absolute hoot and a rave as they desperately
seek the means of pleasure within a very desultory pleasure palace indeed.
The narrative of the book means that it
avoids having set-piece scenes on the whole. Some chapters veer vertiginously so
that there is seemingly no link to what has just preceded, though this settles
down from about halfway through the novel. Again this is the subversive hue of
the book. No clear genres. No fully defined plot arc. Characters who are more
real and yet somehow ethereal as they float through the novel synchronously to
events. These are people just trying to live their lives and just as Alison in
her work has to spy and throw the light on the people she has under scrutiny,
so the author has a similar spotlight cast on Alison and her friends. Sometimes
they are in the full illumination of the spotlight, sometimes their activities
are barely caught in its margins. Personally I found this very satisfying. The
human scale was perfectly rendered, rather than fictional devices and conceits having
to be employed to resolve things or hurry the action along.
Ultimately this is a book about whether the
characters inhabit their lives as an active, conscious decision, or live adrift
within it, as events and other people pass through, unable to affect anything
much in the way of interaction or relationship with them. Which side of the
looking glass do you want to live on? "I can't do anything spontaneous,
like going to the pictures or meeting up for a drink with friends and it makes
me feel frustrated and powerless. I might just as well be standing at the
window watching for my husband again". There is little trite redemption within
these pages. Instead the reader is left painting scenarios of minor triumphs
and gnawing regrets that the characters continue to experience beyond the life
of the book. And that I think is no mean triumph of the novel itself. And a
little subversive too, in its own way.
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