Once Upon A Time In England by Helen Walsh

Helen Walsh's sophomore novel is ostensibly more conventional than the bisexual shag-fest many saw her debut Brass to be. We plunge into a Warrington sink estate and the life of club crooner Robbie Fitzgerald, on the cusp of success and wildly in love with his Tamil wife Susheela. This night their future is sealed, but by an act of sickening racial aggression rather than fame and fortune. A soured family saga that spans the following decade, the novel can seem a little cut-and-pasted from familiar northern chronicles - racial aggravation, aspirational class movement that's geographical but not spiritual, effete sons at war with the straightforward masculinity of their largely absent fathers, the healing power of the countryside to the polluted soul of the factory line worker, etc etc. But the cleverly plotted Once Upon A Time… is a meditation on the seething contradictions hidden behind the stereotypes of thug/immigrant/'Gaylord' and the cataclysmic rush of events triggered by two taboo-defying courtships. Walsh certainly knows how to spin a narrative and there's a particular smartness in the gradual shift of the drug of choice - from the bonhomie of Robbie's roll-ups and Guinness to the wide-eyed Ecstasy and introspective smack that seduce his offspring. However, her characters feel everything to such giddy extremes, drowning amongst paragraphs of swooning hyperbole and pitching freely into grating melodrama, that it's often a test to really grieve for any of her lost souls. [Ruth Marsh]