Review
Tim Pears’s first novel is the tale of the long, hot summer of 1984 in a farming community in Devon. The central family has three generations: grandmother with cataracts, slipping into a world of her own; father, sweetly and tragically amnesic from drinking too much cider; sharp son Ian, who ineluctably attracts girls and lets them think they have ditched him; his brother Tom, inarticulate and close to the animals, in love with Susanna on her pony. The narrator is 13-year-old Alison, who has a secret friendship with the local viscount’s son, Jonathan.
A great many things happen, and are remembered: amazing births, moving deaths, accidents, betrayals and revelations. The animals are alive and fascinating; there is a fire, a financial crisis, two near-drownings, an enemy aeroplane.
Anyone who wants to read the good traditional English novel which this sounds like will not be disappointed. The story is entirely satisfying, the people intriguing and attractive, the place and its mind-shifting heat splendidly realised. But this description is inadequate. Salman Rushdie has compared the book to a quiet, English One Hundred Years of Solitude and it does have the energetic inventiveness we associate with Marquez rather than slow English bucolic, or grimly farcical Cold Comfort, or the miseries of Waugh’s John Boot and his plashy feet in fens. But what excited me was that feeling one only rarely gets as a reader, a kind of prickling excitement: ‘This is it. This is the real thing. This is what I mean by the work of a born writer.’
Pears’s world is neither novel nor innovative, but it is constantly new and inventive. He never puts a foot wrong or writes a dull, inaccurate word, or slacks in his imagination. The character of Alison is a tour de force, a real, intelligent 13-year-old girl in a real girl’s body, seen from inside. The other characters are wholly and satisfactorily imagined, and generously - the reader knows there is so much more where that came from.
The imaginative energy reminds me of Dickens, constantly discovering surprising quirks and shifts and dimensions in his own inventions. You feel Pears has only to look to see things with happy accuracy, men and women, sheep and birds, rooms and fields. He shifts tone gently and unobtrusively in a paragraph. The novel is comic, and wry, and elegiac, and shrewd and thoughtful all at once. Please read it.
A.S. Byatt