Serious Sweet

AL Kennedy

Vintage, £8.99

Review by Alastair Mabbott

THERE must be well over eight million stories in the naked city by now, and from her authorial perch AL Kennedy can see them unfolding, in parks, on street corners, on Tube trains. London presents almost infinite possibilities for the novelist. But Kennedy chooses to zoom in on only two individuals, two very contrasting people who have not (yet) met, but are both trying to hold on to something that will stop their lives spiralling out of control.

At the beginning of Serious Sweet, which takes place over a single day, we find Jon Sigurdsson at his ex-wife’s home, dutifully watering her plants while she’s on holiday. Even after her multiple affairs and their divorce, he is still meekly at her beck and call while other men’s suits hang in her wardrobe. A 59-year-old civil servant whose job it is to mop up after political faux pas, he’s good in a crisis, he reflects, as long as the crisis isn’t his own.

There’s an air of George Smiley about him, the skilled fixer whose wife’s infidelities are common knowledge and who carries around with him an air of helpless impotence. The chaps at work may tease him about sowing his own wild oats, but, as his superiors are well aware (he’s subject to security checks), what Jon has actually been doing is rather more unusual. For a nominal fee, he writes romantic letters to women, who responded to his ad offering “expressions of affection and tenderness delivered weekly”. The discovery of his letter-writing sideline means he will never rise any higher, but he’s ceased to care. He’s even going against the civil service code by leaking information in an almost comically cloak-and-dagger way.

Elsewhere in London, we find Meg Williams, a 45-year-old bankrupt accountant who now works in an animal sanctuary. A recovering alcoholic and survivor of sexual abuse, she’s been off the drink for a whole year. Unfortunately, a day which should be a celebration of her sobriety starts off instead with Meg brought to tears by a gynaecological examination. The experience is a reminder to her of how close her pain is to the surface, and Kennedy’s descriptions of Meg’s alcoholic years (seeing the world through a brown-tinged filter “like oxtail soup with madness in it – the madness of dead spinal columns and roll-eyed livestock”) are consistently raw and powerful.

It emerges that Meg was one of those who signed up to receive Jon’s letters, and that the pair have arranged to meet that very afternoon, a date which circumstances keep pushing further back in the day. Before that can happen, Kennedy interrogates her characters pitilessly for hundreds of pages, triggering their most uncomfortable memories and deepest insecurities to force them to reveal what makes them tick. It’s a long book and, consequently, an emotionally exhausting one. But there’s a lot to be said for a novel which sets so much store by “affection and tenderness”, and in which the emotional peaks and the possibilities of redemption and renewal are marked by the simple holding of hands.