A
German bomb demolishes a London Woolworth’s in 1944, and five of the victims
are children. The substance of this
novel is what might have been for these kids, but the premise is lost as the
author chronicles their what-if lives over the succeeding decades. In fact, the Blitz is never mentioned again,
and, although this novel honors the bombing victims, it becomes just five
separate stories that barely intersect.
Alec is a typesetter for the London Times and outlives that technology
but reinvents himself in pedagogy. Vern
is a serially bankrupt real estate developer who stoops to swindling an
unsuspecting potential investor. (We
feel that the world would have been a better place without him.) Ben is a diminutive schizophrenic man who
works as a double-decker bus ticket-taker.
His mental illness limits his options until he meets a woman who changes
everything. The two girls, Jo and Val,
are twin sisters who veer off in completely different directions. Jo becomes a backup singer and girlfriend to
an American rock star, while Val marries a homicidal neo-Nazi who goes out
every night looking to pick a fight with any random person of color. Yikes!
My problem with this novel is its lack of cohesion. It is like reading five novellas concurrently
or like layering lasagna ingredients until they run out. We are introduced to each of the five
characters, and then we revisit them a decade or so later, then again, and so
on and so forth. I get that it would not
have been realistic for them to have been in and out of each other’s lives, but
I would have preferred some overlap rather than five parallel storylines with
almost nothing in common.
