The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life

It's a curious aspect of life in the western world that while people's circumstances have, until recently at any rate, become more and more comfortable, readers also seem to have found themselves more and more in need of escape. The most obvious example of this - the ever rising popularity of fantasy fiction - has been well documented. But detective fiction, however gritty its details, still imposes a pattern and resolution on experience that it never really possesses. And many historical novels simply provide another kind of escape, albeit one buttressed by research and therefore seen as more respectable. The state of modern literature begins to look a bit like the state of modern architecture: will we be the first generation that fails to leave behind enduring monuments showing our descendants how we lived? It would be wrong to blame this development wholly on readers' diminished attention spans. Many authors who try to portray modern society seem to lurch between two extremes: heavy and essayistic on the one hand and baroque and parodic on the other. What we need are novels that can blend serious moral purpose with the kind of pace and interwoven narratives we're used to from movies and television. What we need, in other words, are novels like The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life.

It is set in and around the Sussex village of Edenfield and takes place over six days in May 2000. The name of the village is no accident: the rural setting is evoked with a tenderness that never becomes sentimental. But there's also something Edenic about the time period: post-Cold War, pre-9/11, with the economy just starting to kick into overdrive and New Labour retaining most of its credentials. The main focus of the novel is on one family: Laura Broad, her husband Henry, a TV documentary maker, and their children, Jack and Carrie. Henry is sporadically employed and disillusioned with his work, but the family's finances are cushioned by money from Laura's father - even though Henry is loath to ask for any of it. The event which sets the plot in motion is the reappearance in Laura's life of Nick Crocker, her first boyfriend. As a University student, Laura fell passionately in love with Nick. For her it was the kind of all-consuming youthful love in which the whole self can be more readily surrendered because it's still so unformed. When Nick left her, abruptly and without explanation, she was hollowed out by grief but eventually recovered and met Henry, in whom she found a different kind of love: tentative at first, but steadily growing and deepening. Now Nick is back in her life, no less cryptic about his return as he was about the reason for his departure.

Around this main story orbits a large cast of supporting characters, whose experiences throw different kinds of light back upon it. There's Alan Strachan, an English teacher at Jack and Carrie's prep school. Outside of school, Alan lives an ascetic life, wholly devoted to his dream of becoming a playwright. His isolation is challenged when he meets Liz Dickinson, single mother of one of his pupils, Alice. Liz, in turn, has her hands full not only with Alice but also with Aster, her cantankerous, tirelessly judgemental mother. Aster's main focus in life is neither Liz nor Alice, but Perry, her small dog - until, that is, the dog is accidentally killed by Edenfield's only remaining farmer, Martin Linton, as he tries to stop it worrying his pregnant ewes. The only witness to this event is Jack. Desperate to win the esteem of his capricious but charismatic school friend, Toby Clore, Jack writes the farmer a blackmail letter. Meanwhile the dog is given a full church burial by Edenfield's rector, Miles Salmon, who has forsaken religious belief for a kind of pragmatic humanism which makes him all the more effective as a parish priest but provokes controversy when reported and (inevitably) distorted by a Sunday newspaper.

As detailed as it might seem, this synopsis doesn't really do justice to the novel's complexity. Yet it's testimony to William Nicholson's great skill that the narrative never feels cluttered. The switch from one character's experiences to another's is more like a subtle change of gear than a change of tack, with the overall momentum never diminishing. Laura's story forms the backbone of the novel. As such, it performs a similar function as she does in her life: being steady, being constant. Yet her dilemma - whether to return to the pure passion of her youth or accept her duty as a wife and mother - derives it power from the fact that in today's world following your own wishes has almost been erected to the status of a principle. Laura's struggle with her conscience may make her seem old-fashioned, but it also lends her an old-fashioned vividness and depth: the kind that readers treasure in characters from 19th century fiction. As the novel progresses, we are drawn more and more into her private turmoil and her reflections on her family provide some of its most affecting moments: "She thinks of Henry...He has given himself to her, there's no other way to put it. That simple act of unwithholding is what makes her life possible."

Having a lighter narrative load to bear, the other characters are perhaps freer to indulge their quirks. But their private struggles - courageously borne for the most part - elicit just as much empathy from the reader. There's Alan Strachan's despair at his thwarted writing ambitions:

"This is the madness with which Alan lives all the time these days. He's a genius tied to a fool, back to back, elbows to elbows, shins to shins. However many times he spins about, the genius can never see the fool, but nor can he escape him. Sometimes in the mirror of his solitude he catches the wry smile of the genius, sometimes the gaping mouth of the fool."

There's Martin Linton's struggle to survive as a farmer amid incomers from the city:

" ‘I do my best, but this is a farm. It's not a garden. My tractors hold up their cars in the lanes, and make a mess, and leave mud on the roads, so they hate me. I mean that. I get letters you wouldn't believe. They think I'm poisoning them with the fertiliser I spread on the fields. They hate the smell of slurry even more...People who actually live in the country are convinced that farming is against nature' "

And there's Alice's attempts to cope emotionally with the bullying she receives at school:

" ‘That's what I'm good at, not minding, because if I started to mind I'd die or maybe kill someone. Nothing matters really things just happen and the trick is not to mind. That way they lose because they want you to be unhappy but if you don't mind you're never unhappy you're just nothing. Which is fine' ".

Yet it's Miles Salmon, the novel's perennial observer, who, when talking about his parishioners, provides what could be its unofficial epigraph:

" ‘ People want to tell their stories, but they're afraid they're too trivial to deserve the attention of others. They are trivial, perhaps, compared to the great dramas we read about in the newspapers. But if you could enter the minds and hearts of each person you meet in the course of the day I think you would be surprised by the intensity of their feelings.' "

The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life is a work of great artistry: deft and polished yet also soulful and perceptive. It looks deep into the hearts of its characters without patronising them. The best way to describe its brilliance might be to compare it to Miles Salmon himself. Like the rector of Edenfield, it manages to achieve something extraordinarily difficult: it blends great wisdom with a profound sense of humility, which, in turn, only serves to amplify the wisdom. As such, it is a novel to be treasured.