BY RODGE GLASS
Faber & Faber, 272pp, £12.99 MOST NOVELS START TO FADE from your consciousness the moment you finish them. Like half-decent action movies, they may keep you gripped right up until the final frame, but as soon
as all the plot strands have been neatly tied up, the diversion is over, and real life carries on as before. Every once in a while, though, a book will come along that has the power to linger in the imagination – to keep gnawing away at you hours and days after you put it down. Such is the case with Hope for Newborns, the second novel from Glasgow-based, Cheshire-raised writer, Rodge Glass.
It's not that Glass does anything particularly baffling or ingenious in terms of storyline – it's pretty obvious what's going to happen to his hero, Lewis, from about a third of the way in. And this isn't one of those annoying twist-in-the-tail books either – there's nothing to "get" – no single mental leap that will suddenly help make sense of everything that has gone before.
No, the reason this novel resonates so powerfully is because of the way Glass locates the biggest faultlines in our society with pinpoint precision – zones where the tectonic plates of identity are shifting the most uncomfortably – and then starts poking away at them with a big, sharp stick. Britishness, religion, the family unit … all the old certainties are crumbling in Hope for Newborns and everyone is scrambling to fill the void.
Glass doesn't presume to offer any answers – he just probes these tender areas of our collective psyche and leaves us to draw our own conclusions from the pain.
His story is set in Manchester, where the Passman family have been running The Victory Barber Shop since 1945. When Harry Passman, a British soldier of Jewish descent, opened the premises at the end of the Second World War, it was an unashamed celebration of all things British, crammed with war memorabilia, with a Union Jack in the front window and a picture of Winston Churchill on the wall.
At the start of the 21st century, however, it has become an anachronism – and a target for vandals protesting against the war in Iraq. Harry's son Clive has done his best to maintain the shop as his father left it and to pass on his love of Queen and country to his three boys, but Charles (or Chuck, as he now styles himself) has become an American citizen, Phil has moved to Canada and Lewis, the youngest, has long since stopped subscribing to his father's black-and-white view of the world. He's an arch-appeaser, though, and the last thing he wants to do is upset anyone, so he tends to keep his opinions to himself. Only very rarely, during his brothers' fraught visits from the other side of the Atlantic, do his true emotions come bubbling to the surface.
The sort of protagonist you want to grab by the shoulders and shake until his teeth rattle, Lewis dreams of travelling the world, but somehow never gets round to it. Instead, he works in recruitment during the week, helps his dad out in the shop at the weekends and does his best to look after his mum, who stopped speaking years ago and replaced the humans in her life with a roomful of pets.
Lewis thinks he's found a way out of Dead End Street when he starts receiving emails from an old school friend, Christy, who claims to have set up a charity called Hope for Newborns to "help you repair your damaged life and the lives of others". Soon, filled with purpose for the first time in his adult life, he is working flat-out to raise money for the cause, even if it means breaking the law. For a moment, it seems as if Christy might turn out to be a figment of Lewis's imagination, but she's real all right. Unfortunately for Lewis, she just isn't the kind of real he had in mind.
Hope for Newborns doesn't always make for comfortable reading, but it has plenty to say about the state we're in as a nation – confused, disoriented and on the verge of falling apart – and about how we'll do almost anything to fill the gaps left behind by the collapse of the old order.
