Then it was all intricately-masted sailing ships looming through fog. Now, for some reason, it is all small boys and billowing sky. Ghost MacIndoe's cover features a thoughtful-looking youngster eating an ice-cream while perched on an unexploded mine as behind him the beach stretches out to greet the sky. It doesn't take a very astute reader to make the connection with Jonathan Coe's What A Carve-Up! and Tim Pears's recently-televised In A Land of Plenty. Like Coe's and Pears's novels, Jonathan Buckley's third outing is a "state-of-the-nation" trip: in this case, half-a-century of English history going back as far as 1944, when its then three-year-old protagonist witnesses the aftermath of a doodlebug raid. With a setting mostly in south-east London Greenwich is a focal point its trail winds painstakingly through a series of historical events.
VE Night, the Festival of Britain, Coronation Day each is brought unobtrusively on stage, each connected to the pattern of the characters' lives.Alexander MacIndoe, Buckley's vehicle for this long and curiously passive narrative, is one of those quiet reflective boys, happy to drift through childhood and adolescence, overlooked by his schoolmates until the day he decides to stand up to a bullying sports master "The oldest boy in London," his first girlfriend pronounces. Even the sympathetic but sharp Megan, the daughter of his parents' friends, whose relationship with him lasts out the book, presumes to tell him he ought to make something of himself. School gives way to Sidney Dixon's antiques emporium, then more work at the shop which, by this stage (the Sixties), is transformed in a record mart.However subtle, a certain amount of signposting is endemic to books of this kind. "It was a humid evening around the middle of August, as Alexander would remember, because the Berlin Wall had gone up, and it was still the main story in the papers," runs one stage direction. "But I have to say, I believe our friend Nasser will get the better of it," his father's boss ruminates earlier.
A characteristic and I think false note is struck a bit later on when Dixon, filling his assistant in on his plans to redevelop the shop, produces a copy of the Beatles' "Love Me Do" "You like this?" he enquires "Everybody does," Alexander volunteers. In fact "Love Me Do" was a very minor hit, and the chances of Sidney selecting it would be fairly remote. As in Sebastian Faulks's Cold War-era On Green Dolphin Street, there is an unwritten law that says that the cultural artefacts on display have to be familiar to the audience.Buckley also has an omniscient strain, forever keeping us up to date on what, among lavishly inventoried detail, Alexander does and does not remember. All this might make Ghost MacIndoe sound like a fictionalised version of The 1940s House, but it is done with great care and attention. For all the furniture filched from the history books, the novel is full of quietly effective writing. In the passages describing Alexander's gymnasium set-to with Mr Owen, or his after-hours shop-room dalliance, the reader forgets the historical add-ons and concentrates only on the foregrounded emotion an effect that most state-of-the-nation merchants would give their eye teeth to achieve.D J Taylor's novel 'The Comedy Man' is published by Duck Editions.
