London’s fox population has increased exponentially in recent years, with daytime vulpine sightings now commonplace and periodic media panics arising over incursions into children’s bedrooms. They get a bad press, to which Aminatta Forna’s new novel offers a refreshing contrast. She depicts the fox not as a threat, a mere raider of dustbins, but as a dignified, elegant creature trying to make a life in the metropolis just like its human inhabitants, though in far greater danger, and with less chance of making it to old age.
The foxes are named: Jeremiah and Babe, Finn and Black Aggie, who is ghostlike and disappearing, and most compelling of all a skinny russet vixen called Light Bright. They are observed and tracked by Jean Turane, an American wildlife biologist living in London and conducting a study of urban foxes. A nature lover, she tends a rooftop oasis above her flat and takes long runs through Nunhead cemetery, having “run out of her marriage” four years before. At the beginning of the novel she collides on Waterloo Bridge with Forna’s other protagonist, a Ghanaian psychiatrist named Attila Asare, who is in town to deliver a keynote speech on trauma. So begins a gradual and delicately rendered interweaving of the lives of two disparate people in the city over the course of a month.
This is not simply a love story, but a wider portrait of the ricocheting manifestations and effects of love in its various stages, as well as a serious examination of connection and coexistence. Attila has another task while in London: to look up his niece and, it emerges, locate her teenage son, both of whom are caught up in immigration problems. The search for the missing boy involves a motley crew of characters who exist at the heart of London’s everyday churn yet are rarely seen: the bin man who tells Jean where to spot foxes; a hotel security guard from west Africa; a “silver man” called Osman, who paints himself every day in the back of a theatre to pose as a statue for passers-by. The fleeting insights into these lives and the warmth that develops within them are tangible and moving, interlaced with depictions of passing animals – of indifferent birds in flight and, at one point, a seal swimming in the Thames. The novel’s perspective is that of the nonchalant outsider, possessing the generosity of vision afforded by distance and thus perfectly placed for the best view.
Also on Attila’s itinerary is a visit to an old flame, Rosie, a former fellow psychiatrist who is now living with Alzheimer’s in residential care. Attila is an extremely physical character – we are aware always of his height and bulk, his love of dancing – and on finding Rosie motionless in her room, he enlivens her by taking her out walking in the garden. His subsequent attempts to change her circumstances come to nothing, though, and he is faced with a new kind of loss, following the earlier death of his wife. There is a sadness that slows Attila in his journey towards Jean, a widower’s grief not yet resolved, and this hesitation is reflected in the novel’s structure as it moves back and forth between past and present, adding texture and history to the characters and themes. At times there is possibly too much texture – the sections from the past range from 1834 to 2009 and are written entirely in dense italics – yet the gentle pull of the atmospheric narrative is enough to maintain interest.
Forna is at her best when describing the sensory and physical landscape of London, its houses “crammed together in a row, like a mouthful of broken teeth”, the whiff off the Thames of “dead trees and diesel”, and in particular the natural life of the city that we rarely see so closely observed. Jean’s visits to the cemetery reveal “innumerable hues of green: bright moss, candescent pale lichen on the gravestones, dark ivy which smothered every tree”. The portrayal of an eviction of parakeets from a graveyard sycamore by workmen with chainsaws is at once beautiful and brutal: it seems to speak so accurately of the routine ejections of communities from their homes, the human pursuit of power and domination.
Fear swept the colony, one hundred birds took to the air, green-winged angels, screaming banshees. The air rolled with wingbeats. Then nothing. Not even the sound of the chainsaw as the young man silenced the machine to look up at the sky. Only falling feathers.
Such moments of wonder give a necessary serenity and ventilation to the cluttered charm of this story, which builds in resonance beyond the final page. Sprawling yet composed, worldly yet intimate, it is a tender evocation of the kaleidoscopic nature of the urban wilderness, as well as a challenge to the imposed centrality of the human animal.
Diana Evans’s novel Ordinary People is published by Chatto. To buy Happiness for £14.44 go to guardianbookshop.com.
