26a
by Diana Evans
Chatto £12.99 pp230

These two remarkable first novels teasingly suggest that the late Princess of Wales has become a literary landmark and that her wedding day, July 29, 1981, has turned into a symbol of identity crisis and false hopes. In The Family Tree, the royal wedding is celebrated by the Monroe family with an elaborate finger buffet at a grisly party that becomes bafflingly tragic, while, in Diana Evans’s novel, 26a, the young Hunter twins, watching the event on television, are convinced that “Love will last when it begins like this”, and urge their bicker- ing parents (“Listen Daddy, listen Mummy”) to let the royal vows rekindle their own lost romance. Later, the twins will understand that, royalty aside, “being married meant not getting on and not getting divorced”.

The Family Tree of Carole Cadwalladr’s title belongs to the Arnold, Monroe and Edwards clans. Suzanne Arnold, married to Kenneth Edwards, a doctor, has done better for herself than her older sister, Doreen, married to James Monroe, who spends a lot of time in his greenhouse. Doreen dislikes Suzanne because, although both sisters live in suburban Midddleton, the Edwardses’house is The Old Parsonage, while the Monroes’ is a semi, 24 Beech Drive. But the family tree doesn’t tell the whole story; some of its branches are hidden in shadows, their elusiveness giving a double meaning to what looks uncomplicatedly obvious. Rebecca Monroe, the story’s narrator, is well placed to bring her family’s real history into the light. She was the sort of child who demanded to know the meaning of life, the universe and everything, her relentless questioning inviting the maternal response, “I’ve had quite enough of you for one day, young lady.”

The grown-up Rebecca is married to an icy-hearted geneticist and, due to his condescending little lectures, has become something of an authority on genetic mutation. Her other field of expertise is the popular culture of the late 1970s, “post sexual revolution, pre Thatcherite reforms”, the period in which she grew up and on which she is writing her PhD thesis. This allows her to provide some wacky footnotes on television programmes such as Man a bout the House, Coronation Street, Dallas and other entertainments, which add to the book’s liveliness. This novel is half delicious romp, half calamitous chronicle of family breakdown, elements that don’t always combine as successfully as they do here. Every twig on this family tree quivers with life, especially the indefatigable Doreen who, with her Playtex 24-hour girdle, which she wears in bed, her reliance on hairspray, Glade air freshener and Mr Sheen, sprinkles the pages with a nostalgic whiff of Thatcher’s Britain.

According to Cadwalladr, geneticists have yet to figure out what makes identical twins non-identical. To the identical twins at the heart of Diana Evans’s 26a, this problem is more than academic. Bessi and Georgia are each other, but not quite. “I am on my own when I am with you,” Georgia heartwrenchingly tells her more independent twin, who is about to leave 26 Waifer Avenue, Neasden, where the sisters have declared their shared attic bedroom, “26a”.

This, too, is a story of 1970s suburbia, as vibrant as Cadwalladr’s novel, but more exotic, both because of its scary passages of magic realism and because the twins’ mother, Ida Hunter, née Tokhokho, ran away from her Nigerian village and an arranged marriage. With a husband, Aubrey, whom she unwisely chose of her own free will, she fetched up in Neasden. Waifer Avenue is disparagingly evoked: “London needed its Neasdens to make the Piccadilly lights, the dazzling Strand, the pigeons at Trafalgar Square and the Queen working from her Buckingham Palace balcony seem exciting.”

It is a place where Ida is so cold and lonely that she heats up the coleslaw and holds imaginary conversations with the mother she hasn’t seen for 16 years; where Aubrey is so angry and muddled that he takes to drink and leaves notes complaining about the state of the fridge. A deadening locale and a collapsing marriage are only a sideshow; the heart of the story is the phantom double- selfhood that Evans convincingly suggests is the troubling essence of identical twinship.

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