[In the following review, Emck deems The Orchard on Fire as “a bittersweet, gentle novel, not given to grandstanding or preaching, but shot through with humour and compassion.”]

Shena MacKay's new novel [The Orchard on Fire] opens in an elegiac mood. April, a middle-aged teacher, a divorcee, sits brooding in her low-rental London garden on one of those ruefully lovely summer evenings when every cranny of decayed wall erupts with dust-covered plant-life. Her reflection is broken by her neighbour, the jauntily-named Jaz, the author “of several unpublished manuscripts of the depilatory school”, who refers to April's attempt to stem the floodtide of weeds as “a spot of ethnic cleansing”. But for all her urban cynicism, Jaz is really Janette from Northumbria, “a damp fungus grown from a spore blown on to London plaster”, while April is “a brittler accretion, but as rootless”. The pair are as diasporic as the pheasant berry, which “seeds itself everywhere, leaving dead canes where it cannot stand the competition, that rattle and creak”.

The mood of creeping disaffection is premonitory. It prepares us for April's return to the Kent village where she grew up in a teashop called the Copper Kettle. English teashops are as immemorial as English weeds. They suggest a 1950s never-never land of discreet curtains, cosily steamed-up windows and scones with “lashings of jam”. Middle-aged April is still April the eight-year-old: “it was the time that coloured everything for me, that set my weakness for the gaudy and ephemeral. …” April loves fairy lights, hanging spider plants, electric candles. And Shena MacKay picks up on details which are so right that April's memories of childhood seem to be one's own. For instance there is Veronica, the schoolgirl who smells of Marmite and—obviously, since she can't shake off the smell of food—lacks spirit.

The village of Stonebridge, for all its staid appearance, is a theatre of English eccentrics. There are the local female artists, greenery-yallery types, theatrical but kind. There is April's grandfather, whose pet project is to build the Crystal Palace using matchsticks, silver cigarette paper, pipe cleaners and bits of sponge dipped in green ink (for the trees). There are April's parents, London publicans turned country-teashop owners and Communists. Less cosily, Stonebridge sports a young man who hangs around in lonely places cadging kisses from girls by jamming them up against walls with his bike. It is also inhabited by Mr Greenidge, ageing but dapper in a panama hat, the wolf in the woods where April plays.

The child's sense of melodrama, her love for secret refuges and morbid, sensational fictions—Deathcap Cottage is one—is threaded into a fearful tale that is not imagined but real. On arriving in Stonebridge, April makes friends with the fiery-headed Ruby. They share a taste for adventure, a passion for illicit hide-outs and stories about murder and code-breaking. Slowly April comes to see that Ruby is being beaten by her publican father and neglected by her harridan of a mother. However, neither Ruby nor April's parents are aware of the pact that has sprung up between April and Mr Greenidge. The Edenic orchard and thrilling train carriage where the children play are refuges from the adult world in more senses than one. Lovers Lane is no longer a childish joke, and the dark intruder they imagine beyond the confines of their camp is all too real.

But April never tells. And the easy good humour of her family life continues for the most part undisturbed, along with the quiet hum of village existence. The Orchard on Fire is an elegy for a lost time as much as a deconstruction of its cosy virtues. The portrait of the passionate, anarchic friendship of April and her red-headed friend, Ruby, makes the novel a celebration of childhood as well as a mourning for the loss of innocence. Their friendship is made in the immediate, absolute, instinctive way that only children can imagine. It forms the heart of the novel, along with April's enduring love for “ANTIQUES BYGONES KITCHENALIA. … Utensils with scorched handles of yellow banded in green, rusted bun tins that print fancy leaves on the bottom of your fairy cakes … a Chad Valley swan and a big tin Triang tortoise”. Yet April reacts ironically when she finds that the Copper Kettle is selling off its “kitchenalia” to nostalgia tourists, wryly observing that “they are trying to buy their way into the past they think we had, they want to be snug and safe down Rabbit Lane”.

The Orchard on Fire is written more in sorrowful affection than in anger. It is a bitter-sweet, gentle novel, not given to grandstanding or preaching, but shot through with humour and compassion. Shena MacKay is effortlessly amusing but never plays for laughs. Her writing brilliantly captures the spirit of place, where every present sensation has ghostly overtones that make experience all the more sad and lovely.