Living can be a heavy business. No Small Thing, the debut novel by Orlaine McDonald, concerns itself with the accretive weight of thwarted desires, familial responsibilities and the relentless, life‑dominating grind of poorly paid labour. Slim and episodic, the novel tracks a year in the life of a south London family – grandmother Livia, daughter Mickey and granddaughter Summer – as they haltingly attempt to care for one another against a background of abandonment and resentment. Also present, in the broadest sense, is Meriem, the disembodied voice of Livia’s own mother, offering gnomic wisdom and serving as a reminder that since we tend to carry our dead with us, we may as well listen to them while we are at it.
Livia, by some distance the most compelling and well-drawn of the three principal characters, is a revelation. We meet her in middle age, body made taut by her rigorous routine of exercise, mind made quiet by her rigorous exercise of routine. She initially presents as brittle and cold, but a series of flashbacks eventually reveal Livia’s affect to be a type of armour, heaved on in the hope it might protect her from the pain that can so often follow in the wake of love. Rather than static and impassive, Livia is a coiled spring, roiling with desires and frustrations, with the fury of having to live a life too often defined by its limitations. McDonald renders Livia with a huge amount of empathy, but also with a rare moral boldness, allowing her to be equivocal and complex at every turn. This is never more apparent than when we see a younger Livia repeatedly struggle with the suffocating obligations and tedium of motherhood, at one point recoiling at her daughter’s “pubescent scent”. A writer more concerned with publishing’s fetish for likable protagonists would probably stop some way short of where McDonald allows Livia to go.
