By Deborah Morgan
£12.99
Summer Seat Press Limited 2023

Book Review by Sandra Gibson

Plutot la Vie?

“More please,” was how I ended my review of Deborah Morgan’s acclaimed novel, Disappearing Home. Well here is the sequel, “Imagine Living”.

The central character, Robyn, is now 16 and has a temporary job under a government scheme, which pins the timeline neatly – it’s the early Eighties, clearly evoked by a writerly mind for detail. We have watched Robyn balancing the see-saw of her precarious childhood between the nurturing, stabilising care of her Nan and the feckless parenting of her home life, where poverty and violence are on the prowl. She has survived through her own imaginative vision and irrepressible spirit.

Now the see-saw is about to become a helter-skelter because here looms the apparition of the Disappearing Home, suddenly actualised by the death of her Nan. Robyn will lose her home because she has lived illegally there and with this will come the loss of her employment. It’s a seismic event that catapults her into an almost Dickensian world of instability, threat, exploitation, and possible destitution.

Not unlike our own dear times.

Robyn looks at her options and soon learns, through a nasty assault described in visceral detail, that the crucial thing about security is to find a safe bed. I did think, at this early point in the narrative that Robyn would sink relentlessly into a hell realm of deprivation. There is a vodka moment after Nan’s funeral; there’s a blackmail moment over proposed pornographic pictures; any one of the circumstances encountered by Robyn could potentially cancel her hopes. However, as in Disappearing Home, the author jolts us with detonations of surprise: the kindness of strangers is juxtaposed against the bleak danger on the streets of night, and all is pervaded by strangeness and by micro-moments of time in which an eternity might exist. There’s an absentee father with whom Robyn is in a state of ambiguous loss and whose existence swivels on a fragile phone call, and there’s a boyfriend doubling up as predator and graveyard philosopher who might shape up in the end. There are convergences in this world where the vulnerably housed teenager, on what we now call minimum wage, can wear hand-beaded posh frocks and eat at the Adelphi. And who is this grieving weekend drunk cooking the Sunday lunch with such aplomb? The author never espouses the stereotypical; she celebrates the complexity between and within human beings.

In the crowded hurly-burly of this twenty-first century picaresque novel, where people move anxiously, hilariously, desperately, in search of security, there are points of stillness and this is the core of Deborah Morgan’s work: death’s certainty. The Big Issue. There’s a moment of perception at Nan’s funeral when the energy changes. It expands: “Nan’s life growing strong again” and leaves:

“In a few seconds, everything was changed into something squashed and unrecognisable. Then it was gone, in an awful hurry, the end of something wonderful slipped out of the stained-glass window without too much fuss, like it had somewhere more important to be.”

So how to behave when, “in the midst of life we are in death”? This is what it says on a gravestone Robyn and Alex see on a date. Alex certainly knows how to give a girl a good time. Their subsequent debate leads us to the source of this novel’s title, “Wouldn’t we be better not thinking about death but imagining living better?” and this evocation of Imagine happens, coincidentally, on the day John Lennon is to die.

Against a background of dizzying transience and between dreams of Utopia and the realities of Dystopia the individual must find a way of being and of acting, and this is Robyn’s quest. She open-mindedly regards the carousels of people and the playing cards of good and bad luck chancing by and recognises the power of the individual to act within the flow.

Making that telephone call or not making that telephone call will both have consequences which cannot be predicted. Robyn is a study in courageous optimism and this reader would like there to be further opportunities to be with her.