The little ordinary things

The Very Thought of You
Rosie Alison

I was super-excited when a friend 'Cross the Pond sent me a copy of Rosie Alison's The Very Thought of You with an accompanying article from the Guardian pointing out that no national newspaper has reviewed it...yet. "I look forward to your review," my friend wrote in the margin. "I hope you like this book!"

I hoped I liked it, too, given those parameters. I wouldn't want one of my reviews to fall into an empty void and put people off of a book, no matter whether or not it deserved it. I am a big believer in the fact that book reviews by themselves should not always be dispositive on the question of whether or not you should read a book. They are more like small conversations when, taken as a whole, might tell you if this is the right book for you right now.

Luckily, I liked The Very Thought of You. It's sort of like the time I tried to make up a signature cocktail that included all of my favorite things (champagne, Diet Coke, a Fireball--hideous). When I read the blurb for Alison's first novel I was overjoyed to see that it featured so many of the things I love to read about. Strong story, strong characters, a large, crumbling English manor, World War II, the Blitz, and the promise of enough pop-culture references to set me humming snippets of old songs for days.

The story opens during the first days of the Second World War, in 1939. Londoners are expecting the German Luftwaffe any day now, and are sending their children to the northern countryside, to be safe out of harm's way. When eight-year-old Anna Sands arrives at the large Yorkshire estate owned by childless couple Thomas and Elizabeth Ashton, she witnesses certain aspects of their tumultuous relationship that she should not be privy to. Slowly, over the course of years, she becomes something of Thomas's confidant, an accomplice in his budding love affair with one of the evacuees' teachers. For Anna, who has not seen her parents in a long while, Thomas first becomes like a father-figure--until her budding sensibilities elevate him to a higher place in her heart. As we follow Thomas and Anna on their separate paths after the war, we find how large of an impact a single person can have upon the course of a life.

This is a quiet little novel. Alison's style is subdued, laconic in parts, so that sometimes the impact of the big events didn't hit me right away. I had to flip back through the pages, my heart beating in my throat. "Did that just really happen? Did it?" In another sort of book it might have bothered me, but it didn't here, because it seemed to fit, thematically.That's the way it happens, isn't it? You don't usually feel the impact of something momentous right away. It takes a while for it to sink in. I don't know if it was a conscious choice by Alison, but it gave the book a breathless verisimilitude.

Alison is at her strongest when she is exploring the ways in which multiple people can have multiple interpretations of the same event. Two people in love, parsing a love letter, and reaching different conclusions from the same words. A moment in time that sticks with a small child for life, nearly forgotten, years later, by someone else. The tragedy in life comes from being at a particular place at a particular time, Alison seems to be saying, experience the same things as someone else, but misunderstanding that person's reality.

In to successfully show this, Alison's story needs to belong to several different characters. We jump around from the viewpoints of at least four different characters with little to no delineation between them, and that was jarring for me, at first. But after I got used to it, and realized how integral it was for us to see the inner workings, the inner responses, of many different people to the same events, I settled into it a bit. The only, only thing I did mind was the fact that the story takes us too far forward--we don't need go all the way to the end, which is the only place in the story where Alison drops perilously close to cliche.

Besides, if we hadn't gone that far forward, we might have been able to devote more pages to the meatiest parts of this book. That was the other sad thing for me: we flew through some moments in which I would have liked to linger for a while.

Or maybe it's just that this charming and poignant debut ended all too soon.

Rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Stay tuned next week for a giveaway of this book.