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.
Fortunately, Dunn’s prose is generally attuned far beyond product placement to the darker, more covert side of childhood: “Our neighbours gardens glittered darkly with laburnum seeds, and in the alley behind the fence were abandoned fridges perfect for our games of hide-and-seek.” “Glittering” along with “gleaming” and “glinting” is much employed throughout, especially in relation to Sarah-Jayne, whose eyes resemble “a hall of mirrors”, the implication being that the real person remains hidden behind a superficial persona. For the main, the kids are unsupervised, and in Deborah’s case emotionally neglected – the only child of a young widow, she does not remember her father, and has no other relatives. Her Scottish mother is brusque, undemonstrative, something of a caricature, prone to darkly gnomic statements that leave Deborah, who is bright, reflective and fascinated by language, in confusion.
While her friends have posters of the Sweet or Donny Osmond on their bedroom walls, Deborah’s crush is Tutankhamun (an exhibition of treasures from the boy-king’s tomb took place in London throughout 1972). “I could detect him reaching back through the thousand years of his loneliness towards me.”Sarah-Jayne is sophisticated and disturbingly knowing beyond her years. Her perfect hair and smart red trouser suit stand out among the assorted bowl cuts and hand-me-downs. She has moved into the “big house” with her family – an older sister in her 20s, who smokes and whose nails are painted tangerine, and disturbingly old parents. The other children are fixated on the fact that the garden boasts a pool, even if it is filled in; it will play a chilling role in the novel’s denouement.
While her classmates flock to please the new girl, as she struts and sashays around the classroom, Deborah at first remains aloof, knowing her for a fake. Sarah-Jayne endlessly opines about boys and men, from the unattainable David Cassidy to Sonny, an 18-year-old apprentice builder who begins, to Deborah’s horror and embarrassment, hanging around her thirtysomething mother. Added to this roll call of masculine superiority is the sinister Max, who is engaged to Sarah-Jayne’s sister. Sarah-Jayne, in a red flag for the reader, refers to Max as if he is her own boyfriend.
This is a novel about everything and nothing, sour and melancholy, with elements of sheer comedy and almost unbearable beauty. These girls of the early 1970s appear to be very much the forerunners of Dunn’s adult characters: comically naive, gossipy, uncertain, bold. The novel’s title refers to Sarah-Jayne’s efforts to persuade the group to attempt levitation, but is also a metaphor for how they will soon be shedding their current selves and moving on. The older Deborah reflects that “I’m surprised any of us lived to tell the tale”, and if this subtle book has a message, it is how alien and yet how relatable the past remains.
• Levitation for Beginners by Suzannah Dunn is published by Abacus (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
