For the past 20 years, Suzannah Dunn has been known for historical novels focusing on the Tudors, such as 2004’s The Queen of Subtleties and 2010’s The Confession of Katherine Howard. Yet for many readers it is her earlier books that retain a unique hold: critically acclaimed contemporary novels and a volume of short stories mostly featuring young women at a crisis point in their lives (a theme that can, of course, be equally applied to her court dramas of Anne Boleyn or Lady Jane Grey). Brilliantly articulated and often piercingly sad, Dunn’s characters find themselves caught up in what may today be termed quarter-life crises – they are unsettled, dissatisfied; prone to despair, to jealousy, to falling unsuitably in love, to deep, unnavigable loss. There is Elizabeth, an exhausted junior hospital doctor in Quite Contrary (1991), and Sadie in Commencing Our Descent (2000), a newly married woman who unexpectedly enters a chaste, doomed affair with a fusty older academic. Venus Flaring’s Veronica sees her friendship with schoolmate Ornella hit the rocks once the pair move into adulthood – a masterly study in rejection, in the intensity and fury of a relationship that has become dismally one-sided.
Dunn’s new novel, Levitation for Beginners, returns to the extreme psychological landscapes of these early works. At its centre is a group of girls in their last year at a village primary school in the home counties, on the brink of adolescence, not exactly close-knit but safe in their loose companionship. Their precarious stability is threatened by a catalyst from outside, an interloper at court – a new girl, Sarah-Jayne, appearing in their final half term. It is 1972. “We had almost all the seventies yet to come,” explains Deborah, the book’s 10-year-old narrator, looking back as a 60-year-old. “We were a year shy of The Wombles and Man About the House … ” You can almost taste the butterscotch Angel Delight in these cultural references, which, while they firmly place the book in context, are a little overdone.
