The Guardian

Ordinary life

Five years on from her acclaimed novel Ordinary People, Diana Evans returns to explore the lives of black British Londoners. She talks to fellow writer Sara Collins about Grenfell, belonging – and how she writes to bear witness

Diana Evans tells fellow writer Sara Collins why she was drawn back to the characters in Ordinary People for her new novel

IN 201 9, DI A N A E VA N S’ S third novel Ordinary People met with a rapturous critical response, was shortlisted for the Women’s prize, and earned comparisons to Tolstoy from the New Yorker, due to her gift for intertwining “the public and the private, the momentous and the mundane”. Since her debut, 26A, was published in 2005, her novels have been a record of our times, offering elegant yet excoriating observations of London life through the intimate lens of domestic relationships. Her fiction takes aim at the intersection of love and politics. Her characters come alive by how they experience, observe and react to current events. This in turn influences how they love and are loved. The political becomes part of the pain of ordinary life. It is a project she continues in her latest novel, A House for Alice, the follow-up to Ordinary People, which continues the story of two long-term couples – Melissa and Michael, and Damian and Stephanie. When we speak, she explains that she was drawn back to the characters by a visceral connection: “I genuinely believed in Michael and Melissa’s love story but there’s so much in their way – psychologically, societally – and I wanted to pick that apart a bit more.”

An injury (mine) has forced me to interview Evans on Zoom rather than meet in London, which is a shame since the city happens to be one of her main subjects, viewed alternately through the fog of adolescence (26A), the fever of artistic ambition (The Wonder) and the panoramic excitement of middle-class black Londoners galvanised by Obama’s election (Ordinary People). For this conversation, however, we’re on computer screens.

When she appears I’m reminded of something she once wrote: “The inner version” of the writer “should be kept enclosed … observing the world around them yet reserving energy”. Evans embodies the grace of a former dancer. But this is also, at times, the practised stillness of a habitual observer, harnessed in service to a formidable, wide-ranging intelligence.

When she finished Ordinary People, she says, she had no plans to write a sequel. In fact, she began work on a children’s book. But the characters kept “speaking in [her] head” and she found it impossible to ignore them. The impetus came partly out of a sense of sheer outrage: “There was all this stuff going on around me that I felt I wanted to document in some way, in the same way that I had wanted to document the Obama election.” She set the children’s novel aside and began work on A House for Alice. Opening in June 2017, eight years after the conclusion of Ordinary People, it ushers the couples through the bittersweet experience of breaking up, and spans a time period that takes in the cataclysm of the Grenfell fire, the impact of the UK’s painful separation from the European Union and the lingering pall of the government’s hostile environment policy. She started writing it, she says, after the promise and optimism of 2009 had given way to a “mounting sense of dishonour and hypocrisy”. The time had come, Evans felt, for “an angry literature”.

“My earliest compulsions to write came from a sense of anger, a sense of injustice and wanting to speak,” she says. Those first stirrings of rage were a response to “patriarchal” rather than racial oppression. Evans grew up in Neasden, northwest London, one of six daughters of an English father and a Nigerian mother: “It wasn’t until I went out into the world at 18 or 19 that I became more aware of race and racism – I had things closer to home to think about.”

The link between those emotions and the urge to write was formative, and thereafter an element of autobiography has underpinned all her work. She describes 26A, the story of twin sisters who are inseparable until one of them dies by suicide, as “a monument” to her own twin who died at the age of 26. Her follow-up, The Wonder, drew on her early career as a dancer, while both Ordinary People and A House for Alice centre the experiences of a mixed-race Nigerian-English family.

In the opening scene of A House for Alice, a house fire claims the life of Melissa’s father Cornelius on the same night as the Grenfell tragedy, and only a few miles away. It is a private bereavement that occurs in the shadow of the larger national atrocity, and “almost feels insignificant in comparison”. After imagining the victims “lifting from the high flames of Grenfell, the grey souls of the smoky children, the surprise of mothers, uncles, nephews”, Melissa’s first instinct is to go and see the tower for herself: “to touch their memory and witness the crime, to be with her city as it bent”.

The novel’s goal is also to bear witness. As a novelist, Evans recognises that the purpose of her work at times like these is to pay attention. By doing so, it might serve as a vehicle for our collective outrage. It is important to her that what she writes has a social value. When I point out that it is the first memorialisation of Grenfell in fiction that I’ve read, she replies that writers “have a call to record and to remember”: “The Tory rhetoric is constantly asking us to forget and hoping that we will, and I’m trying to make sure that we don’t.”

The tone here is more weighted with elegy than ever before, the prose permeated with anxiety: “Fire was everywhere. Death was all around.” But as in Evans’s other novels, these large-scale traumas are interwoven with smaller, domestic ones. As her couples fray, life offers up fresh sources of existential angst. Michael is navigating a new marriage. Melissa is dating – “Sex was a foreign place” – and Damian has also entered into a foreign land of “access”, “mediation”, “lawyers” and a maisonette near the M25.

All of this is conjured with Evans’s keen eye for human behaviour. She has said that she draws on real emotions and relationships to capture the “small psychological acuities” that characterise her work. But if reality is her entry point, once there she needs the freedom of fiction to dramatise her material and give her the necessary distance from painful events (such as her sister’s death): “I will use real stories, but I will tailor them in a way that is safe and respectful to others.” Does she censor herself? “All the time.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that it was conceived during lockdown, the notion of home emerges as a central theme of the novel. In Evans’s own words, it is an attempt to “dissect what ‘home’ means across generations of black British people as a nucleus of trauma, as a site of exile and loss”. Early on, the displacement of the Grenfell survivors comes into stark relief in a city “swamped with oligarchs and tycoons, empty buildings in the centre while the homeless mounted on the streets outside”.

“Home” is an idea that has been “weaponised in Britain”, Evans explains, “as a way of instructing us who belongs here and who doesn’t”. Melissa’s mother Alice lives in fear of the knock at the door. She is in the same position as many African and West Indian immigrants following the implementation of the hostile environment policy: “Their lands of origin had once been useful [to the UK] but now [the UK] found the people of the lands inconvenient.” She develops an unyielding desire to build a house in Nigeria. She wants to return to the motherland to die.

But for some of her daughters, Alice is “their symbol of belonging, the balance that allows them to situate themselves in Britain as second-generation black Brits”. What would it mean to their sense of belonging if she were to leave?

Evans says she thinks of the book as posing a series of questions: “Is the idea of motherland simply a dreamscape? Does it really exist?” Alice, she points out, feels a sense of exile in Britain, but at the same time the Nigeria she longs for is ever changing, and she may be unable to connect to that change. She may never feel “at home” anywhere. Evans was “very much inspired by my own mum and her sense of yearning for her home, her sense of invisibility”.

There is a deeper multi-generational focus in this novel than its predecessor. The children who were babies in Ordinary People are growing up. They are now teens and pre-teens with their own sense of belonging, as well as what Evans describes as a “greater freedom around the idea of home”. This mirrors her own children (an 18-year-old daughter and a 12-yearold son). It’s a shaky line, she points out: “You don’t want them to question things the way you have questioned them; you don’t want them to question the ground that they walk on or have that same level of anxiety, but you also want to prepare them.”

‘Tory rhetoric is constantly asking us to forget – I’m trying to make sure that we don’t’

This tension is another of the novel’s tightly pulled threads. At one point Michael and Melissa’s son Blake asks if he is black. In debating the appropriate response, Michael’s new wife, Nicole, rubbishes Melissa’s unwillingness to have “other people’s ideologies” imposed on Blake, her insistence on allowing him to “seep into being”, as she puts it. Nicole offers a blunter assessment: “Do you think the Met will let him seep into being? What world does she think she’s raising him to?”

This brings me back to Evans’s larger project. As she puts it, her aim is “to document historical events through the lives of black characters in minute detail, the everyday experiences and the domestic scenarios, the changing relationships, and the neuroses as a way of normalising these lives that have been deemed invisible by the culture”. I wonder aloud whether questions of race must always loom large for the black or mixed-race novelist, pointing to Melissa’s response in the novel when an editor requests a column on “black 21st-century parenting”: “I’m not going to be that black person everyone goes to for the word. I’m in the struggle. I am the struggle. I don’t see why I should provide an account of something people might read as an anthropological text, or an agony page.”

It’s very close to the response Evans gives me: “Race has always had to be carried by the black artist or the black writer as if it belongs to us, whereas the problem of race is a problem for the world.” However, she points out, “every word in the book is infused with race”. She refuses race as an “anthropological” theme, but it is already inherent in every aspect of her characters’ lives, as an “added existential layer of anxiety” – because that is just the way it is.

Evans will usually read poems for 15 minutes before she writes, so she can “get into the rhythm of language”. It shows in her prose, which is distinguished by its lively, lyrical energy, by its seemingly effortless expansiveness, and by masterful turns of phrase infused with a poet’s sensibility. She cites Rita Dove, Mary Oliver and Derek Walcott as “god figures”.

Evans confesses with a laugh that she sees herself as a bit of a failed poet: “I have the heart of a poet but the brain of a novelist.” Writing “always feels like a risk in the beginning”, she says, but it’s quite simply all she’s interested in doing, because she is much happier in a novel than outside one. She is already planning to return to these characters; the idea of observing this group of people over a long time appeals to her. But not before they have a break from each other. She doesn’t envisage herself working on a third instalment before 2028 (another eight-year gap), which will leave her plenty of time to write other novels, and perhaps finish the children’s book she started, as well as a collection of essays and short stories (she cites a long list of favourites, including Grace Paley, James Salter, Langston Hughes, Alexia Masters and Jonathan Escoffery).

“I have this weird feeling that after four novels I don’t know how to write,” she says. “And I know that it’s strange to say but I feel like I need to go through a period of exploration and freedom and tell lots of different stories in different forms – just play around for a while. I haven’t played around enough. With each book you arrive at a new location. I feel like I’m at the beginning of something new.”

A House for Alice by Diana Evans is published by Chatto & Windus on Thursday.

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2023-03-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-03-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://guardian.pressreader.com/article/282140705623168

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