Mary George of Allnorthover - Hardcover

Greenlaw, Lavinia

3.67

39 ratings by Goodreads

9780618095230: Mary George of Allnorthover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618095233 ISBN 13: 9780618095230

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001

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This is the story of a teenager at several turning points in her life - a richly detailed and suspenseful novel about various kinds of courtship gone wrong. The day Tom Hepple returns to the English village of Allnorthover, he stops at the local reservoir, beneath which lies his childhood home. Looking for a sign, he sees a girl walking on water. Not just any girl - it is Mary George, an uncommonly sympathetic seventeen-year-old, who seems at first to be more important to others than she is to herself. As near-sighted Mary tries to locate herself in the world, struggling with growing up, falling in love, and breaking away, Tom makes her the focus of his attempt to regain his past. Secrets and misapprehensions surface as the village reveals its stories and unwittingly helps Tom toward the catastrophic conclusion of his plan.
Mary George of Allnorthover takes place in Essex in the 1970s - a small, orderly world disrupted by power cuts, petrol shortages, and drought. The brash color and noise of punk rock is infiltrating the disco in the village hall, and London is getting closer all the time. Mary George is as caught up in all this change as she is in her own history. Her story brings to new life the great themes of family, property, inheritance, and belonging. The traditions of the nineteenth-century novel are both adhered to and subverted in Lavinia Greenlaw's remarkable first book of prose.

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Review:

Mary George of Allnorthover marks the novelistic debut of the successful poet Lavinia Greenlaw . In telling the story of Mary, a 17-year-old from a small East Anglian village, Greenlaw's beautiful and often funny poetic observation becomes apparent quickly. When Mary wakes up after one of her first late night parties, she views "where the shaggy carpet had been scorched, its nylon thread was gluey and fused". Although set in the summer of the petrol crisis in the late seventies, the tale often has the tone of a much older period, as though the village belongs to ancient myth: "Crouchness sat on the point of the estuary where clay gave way to mud." The sea air is of the kind you'd rather not breathe, and the town is "a blur of grey, like a model waiting to be painted". The fetid smell provides the perfect metaphor for the secrets buried underwater in the village reservoir, which Mary finds herself being lured towards, until she encounters the obsessive and unstable Tom Hepple, who has just returned to Allnorthover after years in a psychiatric hostel. Both Tom and Mary have the inability to see things as they are, Mary through shortsightedness and naivety and Tom through mental illness.

In a provincial setting where people rely on the routine of the Parish Council, fetes, jumble sales and scout discos, Tom is tolerated though he is unhinged, while Mary seeks sweet marijuana release with her mate, Billy, until she can move to London. In the confusing process of growing up, Mary has to choose between the snobs and the yokels, and between her divorced parents' version of events from her childhood. In her willingness to help Tom uncover the source of his trauma, she triggers family disclosures and a bigger tragedy for Allnorthover. This novel grasps cloying small-town life and adolescent self-consciousness so accurately that it makes you squirm with claustrophobic pity for Mary. --Cherry Smyth

Review:

‘A poet’s eye clearly informs Greenlaw’s beautifully observed portrait of Seventies provincial life. In prose layered like paint, Greenlaw conjures up the period through details that will strike endless chords with readers who grew up at that time ... This is a suggestive, elusive novel, which achieves a magical effect by the gradual accumulation of images.’ Vogue

‘This is a terrific first novel, a meteorological force in its own right.’ Evening Standard

‘A composed and sensuous first novel.’ Financial TImes

‘A spacious and compassionate read.’ Time Out

‘What is most impressive, ultimately, is the strength and solidity of the house Greenlaw builds around the reader: every brick carefully aligned, necessary and true.’ Independent on Sunday

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