Sadie Jones’s fifth novel, The Snakes, was her first to move away from a historical backdrop: a thriller-cum-morality tale heavy with symbolism, where the strife in one family functioned as a microcosm of the deep divisions of late capitalism. Now she has followed it with Amy & Lan, another near-contemporary tale also focused on the damage inflicted, often unwittingly, within families.
When the novel opens in 2005, the two narrators of the title are both seven and living in a kind of commune at Frith, a Herefordshire farm bought by three middle-class families – the Connells, the Honeys and the Hodges – who have left city life in pursuit of the rural dream. Amy and Lan (short for Lachlan) exist as an inseparable unit, distinct from “the grown-ups” on one side and “the little kids” – all their younger siblings – on the other. “Usually I don’t really think about me and Amy being friends,” Lan says. “We’re always together and I don’t even notice her that much.” But one of the transitions that the novel charts over the course of five years is how the children, raised almost as twins, gradually grow aware of their separateness.
Choosing to write in the present-tense voice of a young child is a gamble for any writer; the fine line between faux-naïf and implausibly knowing is tricky to walk, and it doesn’t always feel consistent in the early part of the book, when the narrative voices can at times sound a little too self-aware for their age. They become more convincing as the story progresses, and the children grow older and better able to interpret the behaviour of the adults around them. But the child’s-eye perspective allows Jones to examine the flaws in this Edenic experiment obliquely, through narrators who feel rather than comprehend the tensions between the adults.
Many of these have to do with money. Rural poverty and the influx of the middle classes is a recurring theme; the three families at Frith bought it in a state of ruin from farmers who had worked the land for four generations but could no longer afford to keep it going. The adults at Frith argue, among other things, over whether to develop the outbuildings as holiday lets or persist with their dream of self-sufficiency. “Dreams change,” Lan’s mother, Gail, tells Amy after one such row, though it’s clear to the reader, if not immediately to the children, that the greatest threat to the equilibrium of the enterprise is the sexual tension between Gail and Amy’s father, Adam.
Amy & Lan is a slow-burner, patiently and carefully building its world through the accumulation of everyday detail, documenting the ways in which living close to the land, with its seasonal shifts and proximity to birth and death, steels the children for the greater losses to come. Jones’s great skill is to switch the mood from elegiac to comic and back in the course of a single scene, making the shift appear seamless. This is a novel of quiet beauty, vividly evoking the magnitude of childhood loss and the capacity for hope.
• Amy & Lan by Sadie Jones is published by Chatto & Windus (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
