Compassionate reflection on contemporary urban life and twelve loosely linked local citizens.
Gemma Reeves’ novel is a lyrical reflection of contemporary urban life that tells the stories of twelve loosely linked characters that live around an east London park over the course of a year. A multi-perspective narrative that shifts between each chapter and month, with a background of secondary characters that make fleeting appearances, combines to create a picture of how closely entwined the lives of a single community really are. Each chapter might be told from a different perspective but as characters are seen through each other’s eyes or simply in the background of others lives it adds to the picture of a vibrant, urban community dealing with the trials, tribulations and triumphs that a year brings to all of their lives. Over the course of a year individual characters across the whole social spectrum deal with issues of identity, alienation and loneliness, all whilst simultaneously reflecting on the aftermath of an acid attack that has sent shockwaves through the park-side neighbourhood.
It is the lives of a Jewish married couple, Mona and Wolfie, on the eve of their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary that underpins the novel, opening with recently retired Wolfie pondering on the years he has lived in the much changed neighbourhood and Mona’s declining health in the grip of dementia. It is the continuation of their journey that closes the novel in the most fitting of ways yet in between there is a teenager dealing with identity issues and the life changing dilemmas that a young couple’s IVF conception brings. The characters encountered over the course of the year are plentiful and too many to do justice to the characterisation of all in truth and I found myself craving more depth and wanting the benefit of a more well-rounded snapshot of a few individual lives.
Written with unswerving humanity, acceptance and optimism the novel shines a light of the ways in which the members of a communities lives traverse and connect, sometimes in the most transient of ways. Ordinary people with ordinary lives but with each chapter Reeves’ adds to our knowledge of how these individual’s function as a community and the tangential ways that their are connected be it through work, family ties, friendship or simply at leisure. Victoria Park is a novel of a modern community with the constant backdrop of the park as the seasons change and compassion and the promise of hope keeps all of Reeves’ characters lives progressing, even in the bleakest of circumstances. The resultant novel, made up of all these disparate lives, could make for a bitty, unsatisfying read, largely due to the lack of focus that a full-length novel delivers yet I was surprised how the book grew on me with its subtle observations on modern life and the human condition. A pleasant read but for me this never quite delivered the payoff or satisfaction that a novel with a narrower focus does.
It is the lives of a Jewish married couple, Mona and Wolfie, on the eve of their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary that underpins the novel, opening with recently retired Wolfie pondering on the years he has lived in the much changed neighbourhood and Mona’s declining health in the grip of dementia. It is the continuation of their journey that closes the novel in the most fitting of ways yet in between there is a teenager dealing with identity issues and the life changing dilemmas that a young couple’s IVF conception brings. The characters encountered over the course of the year are plentiful and too many to do justice to the characterisation of all in truth and I found myself craving more depth and wanting the benefit of a more well-rounded snapshot of a few individual lives.
Written with unswerving humanity, acceptance and optimism the novel shines a light of the ways in which the members of a communities lives traverse and connect, sometimes in the most transient of ways. Ordinary people with ordinary lives but with each chapter Reeves’ adds to our knowledge of how these individual’s function as a community and the tangential ways that their are connected be it through work, family ties, friendship or simply at leisure. Victoria Park is a novel of a modern community with the constant backdrop of the park as the seasons change and compassion and the promise of hope keeps all of Reeves’ characters lives progressing, even in the bleakest of circumstances. The resultant novel, made up of all these disparate lives, could make for a bitty, unsatisfying read, largely due to the lack of focus that a full-length novel delivers yet I was surprised how the book grew on me with its subtle observations on modern life and the human condition. A pleasant read but for me this never quite delivered the payoff or satisfaction that a novel with a narrower focus does.