Mary George of Allnorthover

Banging on the skull, demanding to be let in

---

As the novel opens, Mary, returning from an all-night party, reverts to a childhood pastime and walks along a tree branch that overhangs the local water reservoir. Her balancing act is witnessed by Tom Hepple, a local madman. Now Tom believes that Mary has walked on water and that she is an angel who will show him how to reclaim his family home, which lies beneath the water. Soon the village is aware of his obsession with Mary.

Mary George Of Allnorthover

Mary, who is experiencing all of the normal teenage angst first serious boyfriend, part-time jobs, and the history of her parents' divorce simply tries to avoid Tom; however, a collision is unavoidable. Greenlaw describes the village and its inhabitants in fine detail, portraying ancient feuds and family histories as the villagers interact with Tom, Mary, and one another.

This first novel is a moving exploration of Mary's maturation into adulthood. Recommended for larger public libraries. Precise, lyrical prose distinguishes London poet Greenlaw's haunting debut novel, set in a dying English country village in the s.

British reticence and punk music provide the backdrop for the story of year-old Mary George, a young woman growing up without direction. When Tom Hepple, a local who has spent the last decade in psychiatric care, returns to Allnorthover, he seeks out his childhood home, long since buried under the town's reservoir.

An optical trick leads him to believe that he sees Mary walking on water above his home, a belief spurred by both his mental turmoil and the burden of family trauma. Although Tom's twin brother and other of his family members try to deflect Tom's obsession, he compulsively pursues the girl. Meanwhile, Mary simply tries to remain invisible as she contends with her own insecurities.

Both of her parents are off-kilter: Mary is also figuring out how to belong to a family, to a group of friends, to a boyfriend and her search dredges up further secrets and class tensions. At town festivals and rave shows, the pre-goth Mary and a band of sympathetic characters move slowly in different directions, but also toward an inexorable and tragic denouement. As it turns out, all the family members are on extreme if not crazy quests for God and perfection. Ellie, ironically, is the one who seems to achieve something like revelation, but, in a Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner reversal, recognises it as a form of madness.

If there is anything in common among the girls in these novels, it is the threat of madness.

See a Problem?

In Mary George, it mostly comes from outside, in the obsession the town psychotic, Tom Hepple, has with her as his potential saviour. Mary is the year-old daughter of separated parents, who lives with and is embarrassed by a mother in ankle bells and big kaftans, though Mary's style also runs to the bohemian. She wears ill-fitting charity shop costumes.

Available on

Her father is an architect who used to work out of a disused chapel in their village of Allnorthover. When Tom, whose mother helped bring up Mary's father, returns after years in mental hospitals, secrets begin to emerge about the break-up of Mary's parents and how it was related to Mr George's possibly too-warm feelings for Tom's mother. Mary, meanwhile, in her last year in the local school, is floundering to find where she belongs - with her friend Billy, a pot-smoking, motorcycling, long-haired village boy; with her old friend Julie, working as a waitress in a tarty uniform; with the flamboyant, artistic family of the new doctor in town; or with the foppish art student who seems to take Mary up only to lay her aside; does she belong to the country or London, to her mother or her father or crazy Tom, or anywhere?

This novel is as much about England and village life as about Mary, who in many ways is a generic teenager of the artistic, sensitive type. Favouring style over content, they are doomed to discontent, ghosts, somnambulatory, catching the sense of their lives at one remove - "You haunt yourself," Jacob's wife tells him. Wherever they are, they are always somewhere else.

Banging on the skull, demanding to be let in - Telegraph

Not fully inhabiting themselves, they lack concentration, dispersed, in love with the wrong people: Juliet "wondered if [Jacob] had ever been fully present", while another character is "completely absorbed by something else". The novel's trajectory is towards regaining that elusive "sense of authenticity and wakefulness", an ability to live in the present moment. Characters are thrown out of themselves further by intense physical and emotional pain, which Greenlaw brilliantly evokes with her poet's eye for startling images: Suffering awakens memories of earlier pains both Juliet and Mary thought had vanished, but which now seem hardwired into their consciousness.

Mary remembers the feeling, aged 17, of "walking smack into glass that will not give". Challenging the possibility of total self-sufficiency, Greenlaw litters the pages with those objects, as well as people, we cling to for support - whisky, hot-water bottles, ice packs, massage devices, small white pills to assuage pain; lavender, ginger, juniper oil to help us sleep. Juliet's emotional pain flares up when she realises that she is not fully alive, berating "this entropy… this over-invested, under-lived version of the good life".

Baskets of muffins and bowls of warm milk are inadequate to satisfy her spiritual hunger. Rarely do these people see the whole of each other, glimpsing instead outlines, profiles, shadows, snatches of conversation leaking through walls, which only increase the sense of unreality.

• Conceive Naturally
• Teaching The Moral Leader: A Literature-based Leadership Course: A Guide for Instructors
• Les Miserables (Complete with Illustrations)
• All Or Nothing At All
• Principles of Precambrian Geology
• Being Is Enough: Collective Self-Help for a Sustainable World
• Amelias Journey: A Prequel to the Winds Across the Prairie Series