The Man Who Died Twice, Beautiful World Where Are You and Lily

 

Lots of twists and turns as expected, but it is the witty prose that I love about Richard Osman's writing. The four Septuagenarians are back with Elizabeth again at the heart of things. Just right for us oldies. I liked the odd chapters where Joyce talks to us in the first person. Another (nice) murder mystery, this time about missing diamonds if you can believe it. Among all the warm and funny stuff there is suddenly the trauma of identifying a dead body that is quite emotional and brilliantly described. I did laugh quite a lot.

Gosh, at the start I thought that this was not at all my kind of book. A forensic analysis into the early relationships of two couples, Alice and Felix, Eileen and Simon. Late twenties, early thirties, single, and who themselves are very different. But who are we to judge. Alice and Eileen are best friends from way back and communicate with long introspective emails. Those from successful author Alice are partly philosophical discussions that give Rooney the opportunity to demonstrate her crushing intelligence. ( I nearly gave up on the book before I got used to them). Those from Eileen are easier to read such as reaching thirty "without even one really happy relationship behind me". Surely her Simon (who has a girlfriend Caroline) is not the answer.

I wondered at the beginning if Sally Rooney had started to believe in all the hype surrounding her first two novels. It starts with just a series of facts, boyfriends, girlfriends, the years rush by. This is Eileen: "Each day has now become a new and unique informational unit, interrupting and replacing the informational world of the day before". Did I say her emails were easier to read? Is there going to be any plot? I had just read "The Hours" for book club and thought here is another Virginia Woolf clone. Oh No!

But then, having persevered, I began to appreciate the sheer brilliance of the prose. Chapter five on page 43 is ten pages of magic. Alice meets Felix in a convenience store. Their conversation is extraordinary. That's what we get, conversations and emails. Not everyone's cup of tea, that's for sure. The relationships develop, we get every detail of what that would be like. Yes, every detail. I may have never in all my life have quite understood what the female sex thinks about in a close relationship. I don't know how I came to love the four of them when these are people I would have definitely avoided at parties. But that would have been forty odd years ago. I still don't know why I found the book so gripping when it is flawed, imperfect, profound and sometimes too intelligent for my brain. But I did.

This is the twelfth novel from Rose Tremain that I have read and it falls short of her best. It is still a captivating tale of Lily, a foundling, surviving in Victorian London. It jumps forwards and backwards through her childhood, but we are told early on that she has later committed a crime that haunts her adult life. She is fostered as a baby to a family deep in the countryside which she grows to love. But at the age of six she has to return to Coram, the foundling's hospital.

This is quite traumatic for Lily after the hospitality and care of the family at Rookery Farm. "When she thought about the little girl she had been at Rookery Farm, sleeping under her multicoloured blanket, eating sherbet from the market stall in Swaithey, gazing down into the sweet water of the well, it seemed to her that she was no longer that person, or worse, that none of what she could recall had actually happened, but was only a stubborn dream which wouldn't go away.

I preferred the story of the teenage Lily, working at Belle's wig emporium where her life had taken a turn for the better after the horrors of Coram. The author captures the sights and sounds of the Victorian age and the later chapters move at a faster and thrilling pace.