At the turn of the millennium, then-independent publisher the Harvill Press launched its London Fiction series – a short-lived showcase of “forgotten” classics including novels by Alexander Baron, Gerald Kersh, Maureen Duffy and Henry Green. As a recent arrival in the city, I read all four books – along with Hangover Square and The Lonely Londoners – as a tour guide to the capital’s recent past: its low lives and lowborn. In her ninth novel, Our London Lives, the Irish novelist Christine Dwyer Hickey offers a similar roadmap, detailing a metropolitan experience over the course of the past five decades.
In the late autumn of 1979, teenager Milly escapes Ireland and flees to London, quickly finding work at a pub in Farringdon. There, among its fag smoke and beer fumes, she meets Pip, an Irish boxer and sometime drunk, and with him begins a halting, cautious kind of connection. It’s one that the novel traces via a twin narrative: one following Milly as she negotiates the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the new; the other more tightly chronological, centring on Pip, newly sober and attempting amends, in month-by-month dispatches from 2017.
It is an effective and elegant structure, creating tension, emotional ties and alternative perspectives. It gives Milly and Pip a rich inner and outer life, both together and apart, as they struggle with the legacy of the past in a city lurching into an uncertain future. Dwyer Hickey’s eye for telling detail builds towards a climax that is satisfying and elusive, in keeping with the complexity of Milly and Pip’s evolving relationship.
This complexity, however, is not quite matched by the other characters in Our London Lives. Battleaxe landlady Mrs Oak, brassy barmaid Trish and Pip’s now famous brother, Dom, feel slightly underdrawn, sometimes dangerously close to stereotypes. Matthew, Milly’s later love interest, is perhaps the most one-note example; a property developer whose profession alone tells the reader he’s a rotter.
In a novel dealing with overly familiar themes in Irish fiction – alcoholism and abuse; family and freedom; religion and bodily autonomy – the challenge is to give such tropes a fresh perspective. For the most part, Dwyer Hickey achieves this, making for a readable, emotionally engaging story of two people bound by unspoken trauma and of a city in a state of flux.
Stuart Evers is the author of The Blind Light (Picador)
• Our London Lives by Christine Dwyer Hickey is published by Atlantic (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
