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.
