Book reviews: No One Would Do What The Lamberts Have Done by Sophie Hannah | The Fathers by John Niven

Do not expect anything like the documentary series “Up” or the more recent “Child of our Time”; this not a sensitive exploration of nature versus nurture. The indices of social class are done in the crudest terms. Grace and Dan’s Christmas party has brioche, arancini and prosciutto; Jada and Nicola stretch to Iceland samosas, cocktail sausages and Red Bull, but plenty of drugs. Dan is oversensitive – fussing over room temperatures and treated Grace to sriracha salmon. Jada, when asked by Nicola about what the NHS pamphlet refers to as “returning to intimacy” says “Don’t worry, doll. No ma first rodeo. Jist means yer dung funnel’s gaunae take a pounding fur a wee while”. Do the “underclass” think and behave like that? I do not know, but I do know that’s what the middle class think they do. At least Grace and Dan are almost as insufferable and clichéd; especially with Dan’s penchant for condescendingly collecting “ned patter in the same way some people collected wine or art”. Notably, this is to share with his friends.

One has to be cautious. There is a twist, but it is very much a twist and not the classical peripeteia, a foreshadowed change of fortune. It instigates certain plot developments, and actually might have made a brief, Carver-esque short story, particularly as one characters obsesses in a kind of “for a want of a nail” manner. The final denouement, eleven pages set eighteen months later, is utterly unearned compensatory sentimentality. There is not even an attempt to show emotional development, moral change, lessons learned; just a plonked fait accompli.

One aspect of the novel involves the fictional terrorist “Free Ulster Division”, which seems an exceptionally long set up for the punchline “No one - no one - makes a c*** of the FUD”. Perhaps more significant is the italics and capitals. It’s a novel full of them, which always strikes me as slapdash and hasty: are readers so dim as to need volume control on lines such as “DON’T TALK P*SH! OOTSIDE? F**KING JANUARY FUR F**K SAKE”. The shadow of Big Irvine still looms ominously over the contemporary Scottish novel, alas.

If Niven’s work almost resembles a kind of “art brut” splurge, it is immediately obvious that Sophie Hannah is also a poet; but not because of any aureate ornamentation or pellucid diction. Her crime novels are exemplars of craft and cunning, both in her eerie psychological Waterhouse and Zailer novels and the delightful authorised new Hercule Poirot stories. This standalone novel is set in Swaffham Tilney, a close cousin of Christie’s St Mary Mead. Appropriately enough the village has an Agatha Christie reading group, undergoing a minor civil war over whether Christie’s romance novels written under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott ought to be eligible. It is only one of the novel’s numerous clues that whether there is a crime hidden in plain sight in Westmacott’s “The Rose and the Yew Tree” is a clear nudge to the reader.

It is curious that there are not more novels which present themselves explicitly as puzzles for the reader to decipher. I rather liked “Strange Pictures” and “Strange Houses” by the mysterious “Uketsu” and there is nothing quite like “Cain’s Jawbone” by “Torquemada” aka Edward Powys Mathers (which enjoyed an unlikely lockdown renaissance).

Hannah’s elaborate novel begins with the disordered manuscript of the novel (“by me”) delivered to a policeman. It purports to tell the true story of the feud between the Lambert and Gavey families. We learn immediately this cause célèbre was about Lesley Gavey attempting to have the Lambert’s dog, Champ Cuthbert Lambert, to give him his full name, put down after he bit her daughter Tess.

Almost as an aside, three people died. This game of misdirection and misinterpretation would be a stale thing were it not for the anarchic, surreal humour. The mother, Sally Lambert, is also insufferable, but her ghastliness is a different genre to Niven’s work. Sally is the epitome of cringe, from her life-mission of “enjollification” to anthropomorphising not just pets but houses.

The revelation of the author of the manuscript, who flagrantly teases their identity throughout, is the most outrageous and absurd of conceits, especially so since once revealed, it explains nothing, as it simply cannot be true. It is another layer of obfuscation and ventriloquism. The unreliable narrator has not been quite as much fun in ages. It is a running commentary on itself – I especially liked the analysis of The Absurdity Impediment (see title). And it can be solved.

Simply put: Hannah’s is a joy and demands to be re-read. Niven’s is not.