Chapter Two: several years later. Michael is now married to Rebecca, and they have a young son, Hamish. Strain is showing in their marriage. Then Michael receives an invitation to the Hanburys’ house. But the family have changed, and with older eyes he sees how much his romantic ideas were wide of the mark.

Rachel Cusk first came to notice in 1993, aged twenty-six, when ‘Saving Agnes’ won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel. ‘Saving Agnes’ is a good, character-led novel – about young, unassertive, self-proclaimed failure Agnes Day (a name I’ve always suspected to be a Catholic pun), who finds direction in life - but as a writer Cusk has moved on. ‘The Temporary’ followed two years later: a novel which does take hold despite its flaws. It’s a very overwritten novel that certainly could bear editing in places, but in retrospect Cusk’s style was evolving. By ‘The Country Life’ (1997) it had evolved: a slightly formal, somewhat old-fashioned tone (reviewers detected echoes of Edith Wharton, and I’d be willing to suggest that Ms Cusk has been reading Alice Munro lately) that could be a very subtle, and often very funny, instrument. ‘The Country Life’ is her longest and funniest novel, with a mystery at its heart, and has claims to be her best.

A six-year gap followed, which may be explained by the title of Cusk’s next book, the memoir ‘A Life’s Work: On Being a Mother’ (2001). ‘The Lucky Ones’, published in 2003, occupies the borderline between a novel and a short-fiction collection. It consists of five separate but linked short stories or novellas, linked by certain minor characters in one story being major ones in another. The novel as linked shorter pieces is not new, though it seems to be currently fashionable in literary fiction. (V.S. Naipaul’s ‘In a Free State’, comprising three novellas and a prologue and epilogue of reportage, won the Booker Prize in 1971. Alice Munro, mentioned above, writes short fiction exclusively, but her ‘The Beggar Maid’, several stories about the same character, was counted as a novel and gained her a Booker shortlisting.) Cusk uses the form to deal with themes of family relationships: a wrongly imprisoned woman gives birth in prison; a father goes on holiday with friends but away from his wife and child; a daughter looks back on her relationship with her sister, in the only first-person section; a woman has an uneasy relationship with her daughter who has just had a baby; and a woman’s marriage falls apart. The cycle returns to the beginning as the woman in the final part befriends her neighbour’s lawyer husband – who has cancer and is a background figure in all five stories. He is the lawyer for the pregnant woman in the first part, and as the novel ends, he brings her story up to date.

Cusk’s prose has become a very subtle instrument now, with pinpoint observation of place and mood and an acute ear for dialogue. This however doesn’t quite work in ‘In the Fold’. Partly this is due to Cusk’s use of Michael as a first-person narrator. She has written from a male viewpoint before (half of ‘The Temporary’ and one of the stories in ‘The Lucky Ones’), but previously in third person. Michael’s first-person voice doesn’t quite ring true: given Cusk’s acute sensitivity to nuance, he comes across as super-empathic, and it becomes clear during the novel that he isn’t that at all. Although nothing is obscured, we are left to make our own decisions on the Hanburys and how self-absorbed many of them are, something conveyed by the dialogue of conversations which Michael is present at. No doubt the novel will bear re-reading: on the basis of one from me, it’s an experiment that doesn’t come off, but there are plenty of pleasures along the way – though if you prefer “more to happen” and less dependence on subtleties of character, you had best look elsewhere. ‘In the Fold’ is good enough to make me look forward to her new novel, ‘Arlington Park’, out in hardback from Faber in September 2006.

Gary Couzens was born in 1964 and lives and works in Aldershot. He has had twenty short stories accepted by F&SF, Interzone, The Third Alternative, Peeping Tom and other magazines, plus a large number of articles and reviews in The British Fantasy Society Newsletter, Zene and elsewhere. He has three novels in varying stages of completeness and has just started his fourth.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.