[In the following review, Duchêne commends the combination of humor and sadness she finds in Redhill Rococo.]

In Shena Mackay's new novel [Redhill Rococo], the fuddled vicar, finding himself at a wedding reception, toasts “the horse and groom”; the local librarian gives the over-seventies double fines for returning books late, as they should know better; the local paper reports “CO-OP RAIDED: NOTHING TAKEN”; a cookery book is called “Take aLeek”. … It all sounds rather like a script for The Two Ronnies; and yet, like all Shena Mackay's novels, it is also painfully sad.

For twenty years now (dust-jacket photographs suggest she began publishing around the age of fifteen), Mackay has written with exuberant glee and compassionate horror about people living in suburban sorriness and desolation, gasping for what Forster called “a breathing-hole for the human spirit”; and she has always held both the exuberance and the compassion suspended in her writing, not allowing them to settle into any new composition that might commit her either to a purely, surrealistically funny novel, or to a distressingly sad and serious one. This formula does not make for a seamless novel, and confines her to a minor genre; but it furnishes a great deal to be enjoyed and admired along the way.

Redhill Rococo is set in her favourite stamping-ground, suburbia's Surrey outposts. Redhill is presented as “in essence a carpark, or a series of carparks strung together with links of smouldering rubble and ragwort, buddleia and willowherb” (the time is late summer), and many of the short sections into which the short chapters are divided stamp out its properties pretty harshly: “Saturday night in Redhill; from Busby's the distant sound of breaking glass, a short scream, a police siren. … Sunday morning: a pale pinkish-yellow plasmatic smell of half-cooked meat hung over the back gardens. In the Slatterys' kitchen their Sunday lunch, five tubs of pot noodles, steamed gently …”. Demolition and polystyrene prevail.

Just down the road, but in another socio-economic world, is genteel Reigate (where the author herself lives), with bijou cottages, kempt gardens, and “bedizened ladies discreetly buying gin” at Cullens, or putting on rubber gloves to fold their rotary dryers into plastic covers. The two worlds are to meet, because children attend the same schools. Chiefly, we see the Redhill mother, Pearl, a brave slattern and defeated romantic, who works in a local sweet-factory. As a girl, daughter of a level-crossing keeper whose wife defected, she attended Tonbridge Girls' Grammar School, where poverty constrained her to wear wellingtons throughout the school year and all its activities. Now, she wishes life could be “more like The Bells of St Mary's, where Bing Crosby tucked Barry Fitzgerald up in bed, crooning an Irish Iullaby”. The Samaritans hung up on her when she confessed to eating fried bread while they talked; the local library's information officer, when she telephoned to ask the Meaning of Life, promised to call back, but never did.

Pearl's present husband, Jack Slattery, is in prison. She does not visit, but sends one postcard. They aren't actually married, but she and their children carry his name—Sean, a punk with a heavy line in irony, Cherry, taking A-levels, and Tiffany, a pre-pubertal drum-majorette. Sometimes she is visited by the child of her first marriage, a brown young man called Elvis, his black wife, a nurse, called Precious, and their two small black daughters. Now and then, with dignified repugnance, Pearl sleeps, for financial reasons, with the local publican, whose tongue is “like a slug in her ear”.

The Reigate mother, Helen Headley-Jones, drives a Range Rover, distributes Meals on Wheels, wears a Guardian jogging-suit, and makes pastry on a marble slab; also “toilet rolls in the shape of crinoline ladies in delicate shades of green and mauve and yellow foam rubber” for SDP sales. “Helen tried hard to be good.” The lack of satisfaction this achieves bewilders her, and also her husband, who recommends she find herself a new dog. (Jeremy's birthday dinner—Helen has given him “personalized golf-tees”—with their daughters in an Indian restaurant is a beautifully modulated Reigate set-piece.)

Into the Slattery household, as a lodger, stumbles Luke, aged seventeen, after Borstal. A nice boy, he over-reacted to the “ante-chamber of Death” in the local sub-post-office where pensions were being loquaciously claimed, and feigned a hold-up with a toy pistol off the shelves: one of his many jokes that miscarry. He doesn't want to return to his home in nearby Purley because his mother (“hadn't she been nice to him once?”) now lives in the bath, sleeping at night on piles of towels, and his father, the Rev Ichabod Ribbons, has taken to the cooking sherry after being evicted from his church by the evangelical curate and the “waves of ecumenical laughter” engendered during services. (“There was a lot of kissing after Communion, and what the Vicar found hardest to bear was that they all looked so damned happy.”)

Various things happen. Luke falls in thoroughly unrequited love with Pearl. The sweet-factory closes. The curate falls in love with Cherry. None of this matters much Plot, as usual with this author, is pretty perfunctory: detail is all, and the seeping desolation it communicates, along with the cheerfulness. Most of the characters are imprisoned in a kind of atomic isolation, only now and then bumping into one another. They breach this isolation, fitfully; Pearl and Cherry, for instance, have an “old easy love”, almost forgotten under the detritus of life, and at the end Pearl and Helen draw together in their common perplexity. The author turns a gentle eye on them; and her very gentlest on youth, the only straggly seedling of hope which she allows. Luke is as yet undefeated, and still believes his own wit and charm are irresistible; Cherry still hopes to go to university.

One cannot feel much hope, though, that their goodness will not be soiled and wasted, with time, like that of their elders. This is a very black comedy, in which the hearts of gold glint like mica. The brightness it does give off, and which suffuses it as one reads, comes from the author's endearing inability to resist a joke or to refrain from going too far, so that her frightening view topples over into preposterousness—Pearl's wellies, Helen's toilet-roll covers, Luke's mother in the bath. One might doubtless take Mackay to task for writing a book in which the impurities rise so exuberantly to the surface. But, if England has to sink giggling into the sea, she contributes a great deal to the cruel comedy of decomposition.