‘The past is a foreign country’, wrote LP Hartley in the opening of The Go-Between, ‘they do things differently there’. Cod-wisdom, but it describes the upbringing of this novel’s narrator perfectly. Kovacs is the sole daughter of Hungarian exiles in London who live in a perpetual state of terror, afraid of the midnight knock at the door, the inspector asking for papers they cannot provide. Refusing the past yet unable to contemplate the future, they shiver through winters in a Marylebone flat, unable to comprehend the good fortune that has brought them to a city where origins are immaterial.

For their daughter, Vivien, they expect a similar life to their own: she confesses to being (here Grant leans a little on Art Spiegelman) ‘brought up to be a mouse’ by ‘mice-people’. Afforded at an early age a brief, yet lasting, glimpse of an uncle she never knew existed – a vision further stoked by her father’s apoplectic reaction when he turns up unannounced on the doorstep – Vivien’s curiosity is piqued in a way her meek parents, whose prescient pre-war decision to leave Hungary has inculcated a fear of officialdom so deep they baptised their daughter solely for the paperwork, cannot fathom. Vivien soon discovers the reason for her father’s antipathy: uncle Sandor was a former slum landlord in west London, notorious for leaving his mostly immigrant tenants in disease-ridden squalor, a man briefly notorious as a tabloid staple nicknamed the ‘face of evil’, and eventually jailed for his crimes.

In her early twenties, Vivien finds herself working as her newly-released uncle’s amanuensis. A chance meeting in a park, where neither admits recognising the other, leads her to adopt a flimsy pseudonym and record his life story for posterity. This narrative, describing Sandor’s childhood, his years in a slave labour camp in occupied Hungary, and his eventual decampment to England, occupies the middle portion of the book, and is the most rewarding part. Grant’s protagonist slips into the background, a female Nathan Zimmerman used to tease out a buried plot. Yet these events are circumscribed, never fleshed out fully, and the narrative abandoned once Sandor’s story arrives in London and the past catches up with the present.
The pivotal scene, where Vivien’s father and uncle are reconciled in a whirlwind of events that lead to the novel’s denouement, feels contrived and anticlimactic, and comes too early in the book, leaving the final quarter wallowing in a miasma of short, uneventful chapters. As the real reasons for Vivien’s father’s antipathy toward his brother are revealed, one can’t help but want to return to Sandor’s tale. Narrative accoutrements – Vivien’s love interest, for example – don’t entirely convince and, in this case, seem thrown in merely as tools to craft the novel’s climax. Irritating, too, is Grant’s habitual ticking off of London landmarks like a tourist’s itinerary, a common conceit with novels set in the city, but one no less annoying for its frequency.

Yet despite this, there is a lot to like in the novel. Grant writes on trends and fashion, and her love of the material shines through. Clothes are used to show a person’s state of mind: Vivien’s wardrobe shifts from the ‘velvets, broiderie anglaise, lace and feathers in peach, apricot, grape and plum-coloured shades’ she inherits from an elderly neighbour, to the red leather jacket bought by her suitor later on as she moves in with her uncle and abandons her parents. The clothes Grant uses to clad her characters speak volumes, a form of synthetic fallacy. The trope is more pronounced in the novel’s preamble, and though it features less as the plot ploughs through its motions, lurks in the background, a useful hook for hanging character descriptions on with minimum fuss.

The device is used particularly well to illustrate the complex moral shift Vivien makes as she sympathises with, and comes to exalt in, the life of her shamed uncle. Tagging along, the reader is put in an uncomfortable position as considerably racist opinions become more acceptable, particularly in the light of Sandor’s own history and the act that, ultimately, seals his fate. It bodes well for the novel that, until the end, Grant seldom presents her reader with an easy ride, and the challenges she throws up make ultimately for a rewarding, if flawed, read.