Reviews

Tim Pears’ second novel has over 540 pages but it needs every single one of them to catalogue the teeming growth of the Freeman family tree. At the top is Charles Freeman, a larger-than-life industrialist whose bear-hugs cause his victims to belch and fart at the same time. In 1952 he marries Mary, a budding poet, who gives him four children: roly-poly Simon, bat-eared James, moody Robert and brainy Alice. As we follow the vivid twists and turns of their lives it soon becomes clear that we are also reading the story of our own lives - whether or not we were brought up in Middle England. The individual dramas - first love, suicide, marriage, bankruptcy - are set against a brilliant backdrop of British history - everything form rationing to road protests - that lends the narrative a tidal flow that is impossible to resist. If it seems somewhat schematic that the saga should find a place for an Asian family and a black family, a gay man and a lesbian, it doesn’t seem that way when you read it.

Pears has a God-given gift for characterisation, an old-fashioned faith in the power of the omniscient narrator, that renders even the briefest walk-ons - kids, colleagues, crackpots - a recognisable life of their own. Of course this means that the main characters come to feel like family: James the photographer,

Laura the genius foodie and Zoe the art-house cinema owner. Northtown becomes your home-town and the joys and sorrows suffered in it hit you like a sledgehammer.

Pears has a superb sense of place, a mysterious knack of describing ineffable emotion and a generosity of spirit that is genuinely uplifting. I could go on and on about how wonderful it is but read it for yourself.

Leo Colston

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