The Good Neighbours - Nina Allan

There are some writers whose books you read and you know exactly what to expect. You know exactly what their style and their genres are. It’s very comfortable and very satisfying. But then you can get a writer whose very diversity is almost the opposite of that. Not that their books are uncomfortable or unsatisfying, no, no, no!  It actually makes the experience highly exciting with an enhanced level of anticipation. Nina Allan is one such a writer. Having read The Dollmaker I found her style to be “genre defiant“ and having just read The Good Neighbours she’s done nothing to alter my opinion! Interesting then that Google books want to place it in various genres - fairy tale, magical realism, visionary and metaphysical. Strange this desire we have to conveniently compartmentalise things. It’s all of those genres yet it’s none of them either. And it doesn’t matter. 

The story of a friendship cut dramatically short. The story of a friendship that endures beyond the tragic. The story of a person looking for answers. The person looking to the past to maybe to find the present, and in turn themselves. The person examining their memory with its flaws and its unreliability. A fusion between our contemporary world of realities and a whimsical, fey, parallel world that may have the answers we seek.

Brimming with the literary, cultural references conjuring images and atmospheres from pages past Nina Allan sends the willing reader to accompany Cath, the photographer/ record store employee back to the Isle of Bute where she spent time during her informative years. Using a camera as a metaphorical Sherlock Holmes type magnifying glass Cath photographs ‘murder houses’. 

But one such house is personal. For it is the house where her childhood friend, Shirley, was murdered by her own father. Not surprisingly, for it is an event from a couple of decades ago,  the house is now occupied by somebody else. And that gives another dynamic to the story.
I’m unwilling to give too much more away. I hope I haven’t given too much away already! But such a intriguing premise is safe in the hands of a story weaver like Nina Allan. Always one to keep the narrative interesting the predominantly present day narrative is interspersed with flashbacks from the past and imagined conversations. One of the most endearing aspects of the Dollmaker was the stories within a story technique used to such great effect in that book. It’s less of a feature here but Ms. Allan uses additional techniques to keep things interesting, informative and flowing. She manages to strike a balance between what might be seen as the mundane, ordinary lives but caught up in other worldly happenings.

I guess at the heart of the story is a flawed individual, somebody looking at the imagined and the real to reach some kind of redemption, make some kind of sense of their life. It’s rich vibrant prose full of mystery. Like me it may have you scuttling to google Victorian painter Richard Dadd and cause you to think more deeply about fairies than you may have done before. 

Cathy is a deep character. She presents as somebody desperate to find herself. Somebody easily hurt but quite tenacious, bordering on the obsessive maybe. As a reader I found myself willing her on. Wanting her to make the right choices and the right decisions, feeling perhaps that the reader could see her more clearly than she could see herself. 

For me anyway Nina Allan has done it again. Created a book of depth and imaginative diversity that gives you plenty to think about after you’ve finished reading it. And to revel and admire the skill and art of an instinctive story teller. 

My thanks to Ana McLaughlin at riverun for a gifted copy