[In the following review, Clausen surveys the strengths and weaknesses of The Orchard on Fire.]

When eight-year-old April Harlency, “born into the licensed trade,” arrives in Stonebridge, Kent, the first person she meets is red-haired Ruby Richards, busy setting toilet paper afire in the ladies' room of her parents' pub. As the Harlencies settle in to run the Copper Kettle Tearoom, the two girls form a passionate, nearly seamless friendship. Though plagued by a gendered terror of public spaces (“None of the village girls would have dreamed of walking down Station Hill at night … because everybody knew there was a man with a sack and a knife waiting to jump out on you”), they push the envelope. Ruby takes the lead; she knows that terror begins at home.

Their glorious alliance can't alleviate the solitude in which each girl faces her own powerlessness. Neither April nor her loving but preoccupied parents can do much about Ruby's troubles (a father who belts her, a mother who justifies it). And April can't tell Ruby of her own panic at the behavior of Mr. Greenidge, the dapper gentleman with the dachshund and the dying wife, who lures her to tea and plies her with hideous kisses.

Its jacket slathered with predictable references to “coming of age” and loss of “innocence,” this fierce and gentle novel [The Orchard on Fire] in fact depicts the world of little girls—and the reputedly “safe” era of the early 1950s—as always already tainted, disillusioned, compromised. Ruby believes her parents hated her from birth. The beauty of rural Kent looks like this: “You might catch the flash of a kingfisher or the scuttle of a crayfish into a glinting tin can on the river bed.” When first embraced by Mr. Greenidge, April already knows not only that it's “wrong because Mr. Greenidge was married to Mrs. Greenidge,” but that she mustn't be rude to him. Later we watch her wield unwanted power and understand her adult question: “Had I been the destroying angel in a cotton frock and wellingtons?”

The social scene is understated gothic, numbering among the dramatis personae cracked old Mrs. Chacksfield, said to have slept for weeks with her husband's corpse; two unattractive middle-aged teachers, Miss Fay and Major Morton, spied in a moment of disoriented lust; a visiting professor, wildly inebriated, who drops—literally—dead at the prospect of having to lecture on art history to a bunch of “bacchantes with sketchbooks.” Mackay nicely captures the weird moral autonomy of certain childhoods, the sense of being utterly on one's own with problems too grave to entrust to adult solutions.

Stonebridge is poor and narrow, but possesses an integrity to which Mackay pays homage via immaculately observed physical detail and inspired rendering of a child's garden of language. (April pictures the Iron Curtain as “rusting corrugated iron hung with white convolvulus”; she puzzles over the “dicky ticker” to which Mr. Greenidge attributes his wife's invalidism.) It's a world of rank odors (“piss and biscuits,” strong drink), suffused with cruelty and patchy splendor. Splendid indeed is the abandoned orchard, a “dark-green and purple-blue paradise” where the girls establish the “camp of our dreams.”

The story of how those fragile dreams are wrecked seems to me the least successful portion of the novel. Ruby and April are lost to one another, while the hovering Mr. Greenidge is dispatched with a melodramatic flourish that feels rushed, as though Mackay had belatedly perceived a need for plot. Compounding the problem, flashback machinery creaks annoyingly, and the adult April evinces little of her remembered child self's tough grace. A self-pitying divorcee, she's capable of greeting a misdelivered pizza with the thought: “It's not for me. I ordered the dust and ashes special, with extra acrimony.”

Why didn't grownup April search for Ruby, her most important friend ever? The offhand explanation that she'd “thought we had all the time in the world to find each other” doesn't satisfy when the loss of this friendship is asked to bear so much symbolic weight. The Orchard on Fire ends on a note reminiscent of the lament for lost friendship in Toni Morrison's Sula, but in the latter novel it's Morrison's demonstration of how the bitter logic of womanhood dooms the friends that gives Nel's elegiac “We was girls together” its tragic force. If Mackay neglects to show us where the magic went, she triumphs in conveying how it felt while it lasted.