Barack Obama’s 2008 election victory gave a jubilant opening to Diana Evans’s third novel, Ordinary People; the horrific Grenfell tragedy begins the sequel-of-sorts, A House for Alice. The blaze is described as “a massacre by negligence, a criminal activity, a corporate atrocity, an obliteration of families”. Evans imagines the fire with a righteous rage rarely seen in British contemporary fiction. The narration is nobly elegiac, too, envisioning in the flames “families rich in entireties of love [...] wars remembered and seas remembered and sections of homework completed and others pending, and rows of dolls in children’s bedrooms […] and rivers of futures flowing through shared water pipes […] and mothers lying on their sides with headscarves on and their eyelids moist and warm and gently flickering”. It’s a sequence of startling grace and directness.
The choice to position alongside the recollection of this fire a fictional blaze that happens on the same night might surprise – perhaps even unnerve – readers. This second fire is at the Kilburn home of Cornelius Pitt, estranged father of Melissa, one of the characters in Ordinary People. His death brings Melissa’s mother, Alice, back to a nagging ache. Alice wants to build a house in Nigeria, the place she left to come to the UK half a century ago. She wants to return to “the red-flecked paths of Benin City, with the voices of the air being her own kind of voice, the loneliness and exclusion of foreignness erased”. She wants to go back to her motherland, leaving her children and grandchildren in London, to see out the final part of her life. It’s moving to find the thinking and desires of often overlooked older African women beautifully attended to in this part of the novel. The dignity and seriousness with which Evans characterises the quietly sagacious Alice call to mind strands of Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other.
Alice’s daughters – Melissa, Carol and Adel – have different opinions about fulfilling Alice’s dream. Adel refuses to “abandon” their grieving mother to a life of solitude. Carol insists Alice is not a child and her wishes should be respected. Melissa, sleepwalking through a destructive relationship with predatory David, does what she can to keep the peace. The unmistakable note of sibling arguments is captured faultlessly.
Evans sets out an enticing stall with this family drama – perhaps a Black British, 21st-century rewriting of King Lear? – and by hinting that the symbolic connection between Grenfell and the Pitts’s situation will be tracked as the novel progresses. In keeping with the daring of her previous fiction, the novel does not straightforwardly meet these expectations. The narrative expands outwards; it whirls into the lives and perspectives of adjacent characters, sometimes lending the novel the feel of a collection of linked short stories.
Melissa’s ex-husband, Michael, has married Nicole, an exuberant fiftysomething singer still determined – or desperate? – to hit the big time despite the music industry’s obsession with youth. Her work takes us into lovingly realised settings: moody jazz bars, boozy Soul Weekenders and creaky pantomimes at the Catford theatre. Though Michael and Nicole’s relationship brims with the sensuality of the R&B she croons, Michael doubts the depth of their love. Memories of his previous marriage stalk him. Then there’s Damian – an old friend of Michael’s who had an ill-advised tryst with Melissa. He’s plagued with worry about his troubled teenage daughter, Avril.
Other children are sources of concern, too: Blake is Michael and Melissa’s fabulously curious son. His heart murmur – his heart’s “extra voice” – worsens as the months pass. Whispers of magic realism and an openness to the numinous are features of Evans’s 26a and Ordinary People, and appear here too. The depiction of Cornelius’s deteriorating mind and his passing through the afterlife are especially mesmerising.
Evans records the interiorities of her characters and their lives with acutely realistic detail. Realism, of course, doesn’t mean dullness. Far from it: the pages are full of plush sentences. Few writers describe with such inventiveness, eloquence and thoroughness, even in the most seemingly mundane situations.
There is sometimes so much detail and rich depth that our eponymous protagonist vanishes. In the middle of the novel, I worried that Alice’s plaintively expressed view of her societal erasure – “nobody knows who I am” – was being enacted upon her by the text. The narrative seems to lose interest in her story, one of emotional displacement in later life that is compelling in its own right.
But then I flicked back to Evans’s first epigraph, a section from Derek Walcott’s soaring poem The Schooner Flight: “Where is my rest place, Jesus? Where is my harbour? / Where is the pillow I will not have to pay for, / And the window I can look from that frames my life?”
These lines provide a lens through which to view Evans’s sweeping work in the round. Rereading them, I thought about the poem’s restive tone and the sense of roaming. These ideas powerfully inform the formal qualities of this capacious novel. Because, as we move elegantly between the characters’ anxieties – Michael’s career insecurities, Avril’s questions about her body, Alice’s guilt at reneging on wifely duty, Adel’s hardships as a single mother – we see that all are struggling to find a reassuring sense of home within themselves and their families. Indeed, as people of colour, following scandals such as Windrush and Grenfell, which revealed “the cold … machine at the centre of the nation’’, it is difficult also for Evans’s characters to unequivocally feel at home within our fractious and often hostile nation. But this generous novel, with its porousness and fluidity, makes space for them all.
• A House for Alice by Diana Evans is published by Chatto & Windus (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
