[In the following review, Yardley regards An Advent Calendar as a proletariat novel.]

No doubt about it, this is a very strange novel. Written by a British novelist who has published numerous other books, it ventures into territory not often occupied by the novel, which is in essence a middle-class institution. An Advent Calendar by contrast is working-class fiction: not proletarian, guided by political and/or ideological purposes, but descriptive and empathetic, a look inside a world that is familiar to few regular readers of conventional fiction.

Shena Mackay sets the tone immediately. John, a young married man in difficult economic circumstances, stops by the butcher's for a bit of meat to share with his uncle, Cecil, with whom he and his small, unhappy family are temporarily lodging. He buys ground meat, which at home he tosses into spaghetti sauce. “Piece of gristle,” he remarks to Cecil, and pushes the offending morsel to the side of his plate. “I'll have it,” Cecil says and gobbles up the last of the grub.

Gristle, indeed. That hard piece of meat was a human finger, sliced from Mick, the butcher, as he wielded his cleaver. When John comprehends what has happened, he feels compelled to atone for Mick's loss but can only shout at him: “Do you want to know what happened to your finger? It got minced up by accident and my uncle and I ate it. That's right! I've eaten part of you!”

We are not, to put it mildly, in the world of haute cuisine. This is blue-collar England, a place where anonymous people struggle through bleak lives that offer little prospect of advancement and not much more of happiness. Marguerite, John's wife, feels weighed down by gloom as she “put on John's corduroy trousers, another sweater and socks, got into bed and lay too cold to move between the ancient sheets, thinking that she must lie there for at least thirty-one nights, because it was December 1st, and saw each day open like a dark door in an Advent Calendar.”

She has ample reason to feel blue. Not merely does her family have almost no money—John is reduced to swabbing for a cleaning service—but she must share close quarters with the eccentric Cecil, and she is utterly out of sorts with her husband. “He is completely indifferent to me,” she thinks as, a few feet away, he thinks. “How strange that that exotic bird should choose to perch for the duration of its one life on the chair opposite mine. Why does it stay, why not simply fly away?”

This in a fashion is what Marguerite ends up doing. She becomes involved with another man, one of some means who is happy to reward her with gifts of cash in exchange for the favors she extends. Yet rather than estrange her from her husband and children, this extramarital adventure gives her the freedom to buy Christmas gifts and bring something like pleasure into the household. Happiness may not be easy to come by, Mackay reminds us, but it is often nearer to our grasp than we are able to realize.

A similar lesson is learned in somewhat different ways by others who cross the family's path. Elizabeth, John's sister, had her own dread; she “couldn't remember how long she had known that she was going to be murdered, but could remember as a child lying stricken in a bath of congealing water, afraid to emerge lest her family had been silently slaughtered with an axe and the killer awaited her.” Yet rather than succumb and withdraw, she tries to befriend a student in the school where she teaches. Joy—never has a child been more cruelly misnamed—is a sad droopy creature, by her own account “the odd one out,” teased at school and neglected at home; “her heart was so conditioned by dread that it lurched, on holidays and weekdays alike.”

Elizabeth helps Joy find work babysitting for a friend, but what lies in wait is the friend's husband, a mediocre poet who promptly seduces Joy. What the two commit is “an unspeakable crime,” yet for the joyless Joy it arouses a feeling that might almost be called love, a connection with another human being, however illicit and abusive, that brings her alive for a few moments.

Happiness, Mackay seems to be saying, is where one must find it and does not often arrive in the form desired. This is true, and An Advent Calendar has the ring of truth. Mackay keeps her distance from her characters, but she never condescends to them. What humanity they achieve may seem parched to those who are more fortunate, but it is humanity all the same and must be recognized and honored as such. This Mackay does in a book that catches the reader by surprise: Terse and economical, Advent Calendar has far more to it than one first apprehends.