The Hand That First Held Mine: Maggie O’Farrell

It is summer in London.  I know this for certain.  Not because it is blazing hot.  I have lived in England for too long to put my faith in the weather as an indication of the seasons.  But this afternoon, I heard an ice cream van.  I didn’t even know there were mobile ice cream vans in London.  I thought they were all parked next to tourist traps for the captive market.  I’m not sure how much passing trade there was at two o’clock on my street.  Still.  There it is.  Summer.  And just in case there was any doubt, Wimbledon is on.

So, what to read?

I hardly ever read books more than once.  They really have to count as favourites.  There are too many other things to read.  But I have read two books by O’Farrell twice: ‘After You’d Gone’ and ‘The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox’.  I still count ‘After You’d Gone’ as one of the most striking debuts I’ve ever read, even though I now see a few flaws.  Likewise, I still feel outraged about what happens in ‘The Vanishing Act’ (in a good way, on Esme’s behalf).  Her other books are less effective, but on the strength of these two, I was very excited to read ‘The Hand that First Held Mine.’

I was not disappointed.  This is a truly excellent read.  It’s about two women: Elina, living in the present day, a Finnish painter who has just had her first baby, and Lexie, starting a new life in 1950′s Soho.  They are recognisable Maggie O’Farrell heroines.  They are competent, brave, self-assured, unconventional without being annoying about it.  The narrative shifts between their lives as you try and work out how exactly they are connected.  There are clues, but there are also red herrings.  Or not red herrings, exactly, but sentences which make you think something is going to happen – and it does, but not in the way you expect.  Instead, other, unexpected, things happen in the meantime.  I don’t know what the word for that is, but it is much cleverer than straightforward red herrings.

This book starts very slowly.  There is a lot of establishing character and atmosphere building, with wonderful descriptions of 1950′s Soho. The pace really picks up in the second half.  There is a sense of hurtling towards the inevitable, though it takes a while to work out what the inevitable is.  At a certain point, I experienced the same sense of righteous anger as when I read ‘The Vanishing Act.’  When I worked out what was going on, it was like being kicked in the stomach.  I exclaimed loudly at my tomato plants.  You can see what is going to happen but you can’t stop it happening.  Like other O’Farrell books, there is a huge sense of the unfairness of things, and the way chance events send people’s lives in very unexpected directions.

This is also a very ‘London’ book, and more particularly, my part of London.  I know all the places described.  I can picture the walks the characters go on.  I lived on the same street as Lexie for a while.  This is a book about unexpected connections, so it was satisfying to have my own connection with the characters.   There are also reminders of London’s history.  Significant places in the 1950s reappear in the present day, though of course, only the reader knows it.  The writing is elegant, the descriptions well done (you instantly know a lot about a man’s character from the fact that he’s wearing a daffodil yellow tie in ’50s Devon) and the metaphors often surprising.

You must read this.  It’s the best thing I’ve read since ‘Wolf Hall’ (and totally different).