Book Reviews - Review 340

Matthew Halland works for a firm of architects that is designing an office block in London's Docklands in the late 1980s. Visits to the grandiose new development, and to the sites of smaller-scale renovation projects, have Halland criss-crossing London daily, and give him the impetus to ruminate on the character of his city with an insider's eye.

Halland is recently separated from his wife, and going through a melancholy patch. With a lightweight relationship with a physiotherapist, the company of his daughter every weekend, and interest in his job keeping him going, he nevertheless mourns continually the departure of love from his marriage. The sight of buildings being demolished and raised up all around him plays up to his brooding sense of things' impermanence.

He buys lunch in a sandwich bar for a woman who's forgotten her purse, and fantasises that she might be "the one". He is wooed by a disreputable property magnate, declines in unwisely strident terms, and is subjected to a campaign of harrassment when the magnate becomes convinced that Halland is working for a rival firm of developers.

Lively doesn't deal in the exceptional or the dramatic: her novels are usually about ordinary people undergoing life's everyday crises. The plot of City of the Mind is very simple, being essentially a peg on which the author hangs ruminations on life, love and history. So the novel is easy to read. It has some good descriptive passages, is quite moving, and regards the world with understated sympathy.

But there's a lack of coherence to it. There are several subplots that have no bearing on the main story: a homeless girl scavenges for food around Covent Garden; an air raid warden attends to bomb carnage during the Blitz. This all chimes in with Lively's oft-iterated view of time and place as kaleidoscopic; in our imaginations, we are free to wander both at will. That doesn't mean, however, that one can throw what one likes into a story by appealing to the theme of "differing perspectives". Lively has written around twenty novels to date, and even a talented author can't knock them out that quickly without sacrificing something in craftsmanship.

The most disappointing aspect of the novel is the dialogue. This has never been Lively's strong suit, but in City of the Mind it's consistently stilted and naïve. A man serving in a sandwich bar comments over-familiarly on Halland's evident attraction to a fellow-customer; Rutter, the property magnate, is a caricature, voicing his threats overtly where a true villain would employ the greater power (and the greater legal advisability) of the implicit threat. Almost all the characters say too much of what they think, and - worse - too much of what Lively thinks. Oddly enough, the only one who speaks realistically is Halland's eight-year-old daughter Jane.

The novel works best as a portrait of London: at that level, it's detailed and atmospheric. The idea of contemplating the capital through the eyes of one of the people who design it is a good one, and the insight we get into the architect's world is convincing and informative - even if it leaves us wondering if more effort went into the research for this novel than into its writing.

For all its flaws, this is a humane and thoughtful read. I didn't find it either boring or depressing, and therefore mark it a qualified success.