The Dark Circle by Linda Grant (Virago, £16.99)
The Dark Circle wears various disguises. It is a post-war novel which might be describing post-Brexit Britain with its fears and prejudices. It is about illness and the new, if shaky, egalitarianism of the NHS, but also a rejoinder to today’s populist view that things were better back then. It deals with dark subject matter with a lightness of tone. These disguises strain awkwardly against each other at times, although there is something eminently British in its stiff upper lip stoicism.
It opens in 1949, when Britain seethes with anti-Semitism and angst about immigration. Middle England lives in fear of “a family of Hebrews [moving in] next door,” and a rally is mobilised in Trafalgar Square to protest against “The Yids, the Yids, the bloody Yids…”
East End Jewish teenagers, Lenny and Miriam, live among it all but refuse to be victims, even when they wind up at the Gwendo, a tuberculosis sanatorium, whose authoritarianism reminds their mother of “the camps.”
The Gwendo is Grant’s microcosmic melting pot: all of Britain is represented, from the snobs of Edgbaston to the pale-faced aristocrat as well as the cheeky cockney twins. No character strays too far from their generic template. There are touching personal stories, but despair is avoided and bleakness is leavened by rambunctiousness, sometimes between randy patients and comely nurses in scenes that contain more than a hint of Carry On cartoonishness.
Tragedy is in the end averted by a picaresque caper, though at times the novel strains to keep smiling.
The Dark Circle wears various disguises. It is a post-war novel which might be describing post-Brexit Britain with its fears and prejudices. It is about illness and the new, if shaky, egalitarianism of the NHS, but also a rejoinder to today’s populist view that things were better back then. It deals with dark subject matter with a lightness of tone. These disguises strain awkwardly against each other at times, although there is something eminently British in its stiff upper lip stoicism.
It opens in 1949, when Britain seethes with anti-Semitism and angst about immigration. Middle England lives in fear of “a family of Hebrews [moving in] next door,” and a rally is mobilised in Trafalgar Square to protest against “The Yids, the Yids, the bloody Yids…”
East End Jewish teenagers, Lenny and Miriam, live among it all but refuse to be victims, even when they wind up at the Gwendo, a tuberculosis sanatorium, whose authoritarianism reminds their mother of “the camps.”
The Gwendo is Grant’s microcosmic melting pot: all of Britain is represented, from the snobs of Edgbaston to the pale-faced aristocrat as well as the cheeky cockney twins. No character strays too far from their generic template. There are touching personal stories, but despair is avoided and bleakness is leavened by rambunctiousness, sometimes between randy patients and comely nurses in scenes that contain more than a hint of Carry On cartoonishness.
Tragedy is in the end averted by a picaresque caper, though at times the novel strains to keep smiling.
