Our London Lives (2024)
Why this one?
This one just struck me as right up my street. I haven’t previously read anything by the author, and the endorsements seemed very strong, so why not?
Christine Dwyer Hickey (nee Dwyer; 1958- ; active 1991- ) was born in Dublin, Ireland. The only girl of four siblings, she was brought up by her father after the breakdown of her parents' marriage.
She began by writing short stories, winning prizes for her work in the early 90s. Her first three novels form a trilogy ("The Dublin Trilogy"), published initially as The Dancer (1995), The Gambler (1996) and The Gatemaker (2000). She has subsequently published a collection of short stories, a play, and a further seven novels, including Tatty (2004) which was longlisted for the Women's Prize, and The Narrow Land (2019) which won the 2020 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
Our London Lives will be published by Atlantic in September this year. Thanks to them and Netgalley for the ARC.
Thoughts, etc.
Our London Lives is told from the alternating viewpoints of two Irish immigrants who meet in a central London pub in the 1970s. Milly is a bartender at a traditional city pub, catering for a diverse clientele covering locals, city workers, and most importantly, boxers from a neighbouring club. One of those is Pip, who we first encounter as an ex-convict who has just come out of rehab, in 2017 (the novel’s ‘present day’). Pip’s story is told entirely from the vantage point of that present day, with all the retrospective mix of nostalgia and regret that comes with that sort of angle. By contrast, Milly’s narrative unfolds chronologically, in the moment, through the years from the late 1970s through to, eventually, 2017. In her story there are large leaps and gaps that aren’t immediately filled in, but the two perspectives collide in a richly satisfying (though far from conclusive) ending.
For both characters, aspects of their past history only emerge slowly through the novel. Both, we eventually learn, have suffered at the hands of others (outside the bounds of the book) and both experience tragedies of sorts in the course of the book itself., though interestingly they take place largely in the gaps rather than the fragments of time we experience directly with them. In Milly’s case, her greatest loss is told in a heartbreaking fashion, in an early chapter which begins by seeming innocuously comic, but ends with a reveal of a trauma from which she’ll never fully recover.
While the personal tragedies and the will they / won’t they romance between the two central characters are the novel’s emotional heart, there’s also a lot more going on around the edges. As befits a novel with a grand historical sweep of this nature, real-world events are touched on. The thread throughout is of the decline of the version of London in which we first meet Milly, one in which communities still thrive and everyone seems to know everyone else, as developers slowly encroach, initially with a degree of optimism (alongside the evident greed) but one which is firmly shattered by the financial crisis of 2008, at which point Milly is quite literally sleeping with the enemy.
The London that Pip emerges in, of 2017, seems purposefully chosen to highlight the nadir reached by the city following those years of capital-fuelled destruction and subsequent decline. In a section that could have been crass, but is actually handled rather well, Pip finds himself experiencing near-hand the tragedy of the Grenfell fire. At the time, he’s living with his musician brother, in a swish apartment in Notting Hill. His brother has fallen on hard times (like many) and Pip busies himself monetising the property via Airbnb. Their middle class woes are very much overshadowed by the tragedy unfolding just down the road.
It’s a book of many layers. On the surface, the romance is beautifully told - largely through gaps and absences but no less powerful for it. The historical touchpoints are smartly chosen and for the most part subtly deployed in service of the books central themes, rather than crammed in for the sake of it. And underneath it all, there’s a very literary layer of allusion to Eliot’s The Waste Land, which Pip becomes obsessed with while in prison and carries with him throughout.
Overall it’s an exquisitely crafted thing. The initial immersion in the world of historic London back-street pubs had me thinking of the brilliant Patrick Hamilton from the off, but there was something about the rest of the book that (more remarkably) sustained that feeling, even as it moved between locations (away from the essential pub) and into the present day. Dwyer Hickey is a Joyce expert, and that also shines through in the best way, with the book taking the vibes of Dubliners and applying them to modern-day London in a manner I’ve not seen handled quite so effectively before. It’s an easy, compelling read, with a love story with broad appeal at its heart, but it’s also so much more than that.
Score
9.5
A really wonderful book, one that will definitely see me reading more of the author’s work, and hopefully one that will be recognised in some of the next year’s major prizes.
Next up
I’m rather excited to be checking our Alan Hollinghurst’s new one. After that, we might be already in Booker season?
