Poppy Shakespeare is one of the Orange longlist titles that didn’t make it to the shortlist, which must have been a disappointment for author Clare Allan, but is nevertheless a fine achievement for a first novel.

Poppy Shakespeare joins the great tradition of novels that describe the impact of ‘stranger comes to town’, or rather ‘memorable new character joins the institution’ – reminiscent of Barbara’s obsequious observations in Notes on a Scandal, or Francois Seurel’s hero-worship in Le Grand Meaulnes. In the case of Poppy Shakespeare, it is N the Narrator who records every event involving precocious Poppy, the glamorous new arrival at the Dorothy Fish daycare centre in north London.

Poppy wows them all with her short skirt and snakeskin heels, and her insistence that she alone is completely ‘normal’, admitted by some kind of mistake. We follow her through the farcical ‘communication classes’, the insider trading in medications in exchange for cigarette butts (or vice versa), and the applications for ‘MAD money’ to keep her on in the institution – all opportunities for political side-swipes at the bureaucracy of the mental health business, and who or what is really ‘sane’.

But it is the voice of N’s narration that ultimately carries as much significance in the novel as the rise and fall of Poppy’s reputation. Deliberately it is not ‘Middle-Class Michael’ or even ‘Astrid Arsewipe’ who is chosen from amongst the inmates as our guide, but poor sad N, who never had a hope after her mother jumped under a train at Mill Hill East. N speaks to us throughout in her head-banging vernacular (‘ain’t my fault is it, do you know what I’m saying’), and it takes some pages before you can bear these crashing cadences in your ear. But by the end of the book N’s voice has become a totally familiar part of your experience, and you almost miss her monologues when she walks out of the Dorothy Fish and hides her head under a blanket for twenty pages.

Which is what the novel is clearly saying to us all: put any ‘sane’ person or reader into an institutional environment, and subject them to all the pettinesses and paranoia of that institution; can you be surprised when in the end you too become absorbed into that life?

As Chekhov’s epigram quoted at the beginning of the novel says,
‘Since prisons and madhouses exist, why, somebody is bound to sit in them’.