A street full of secrets

Among the residents of an ordinary suburban street there is a ‘ goat’, an ‘ unbelonger’ upon whom suspicion falls when things go awry.

THE trouble with hype is that you have to live up to it. And The Trouble With Goats And Sheep has certainly been hyped.

A first novel, it was sold for “a high five- figure sum” and has had high levels of advance publicity of the expensive sort – national newspaper advertisements, posters – as well as the usual cheaper- to- run social media campaigns. Is it justified? Joanna Cannon is a trained doctor who now specialises in psychiatry.

Her chosen specialism is the source of much of her motivation to write, as she makes clear on her blog, joannacannon. com/ blog.

“Working in psychiatry, I meet a lot of people who ‘ unbelong’. Those who live on the periphery of life, pushed by society to the very edge of the dance floor, where they try to copy what everyone else is doing but never quite get it right.

“There is a silent herd of unbelongers out there, not just on the mental health wards, but stitched through the landscape of everyone’s day, walking around supermarkets and standing in bus queues. These are the goats. The people who just don’t fit in, who aren’t quite like us.

“It’s only when something goes wrong, and society needs someone to blame, that the sheep turn to the goats and say we knew they were strange all along, and of course they must be guilty, because they just look the type, don’t they?”

I have quoted this at length because I think it is key to understanding Cannon’s book. This is a novel with a social and moral purpose. It’s a plea for compassion for the goats, not least because, she implies, there is a little bit of the goat in all of us.

It is 1976, an extremely long, hot summer of drought. Gardens dry up and the heat is inescapable.

It is oppressive, as is the atmosphere of The Avenue, a non- specific but typical residential street of fairly ordinary- seeming householders in an unidentified English town.

One of their number, Mrs Creasy, has gone missing.

And it seems that with her disappearance has departed whatever cohesion and harmony has held the residents together.

There are secrets, too, that hold these people together. There’s a baby kidnapped – briefly. There’s a fire, and something some of these people did almost a decade ago. They talk about it but in an oblique way that doesn’t let the reader in on the secret.

Margaret Creasy, it is alleged, knows all about them. She knows what they have done. And their unease sparks fear, a fear that is made known in innuendo, muttered asides and clandestine conversations.

The book is narrated in a variety of ways but the key voice belongs to 10- year- old Grace. Her name, of course, is intentionally significant. Grace and her much more appealing sidekick Tilly decide to look for God because as He is everywhere it stands to reason that they should be able to find Him anywhere and, if they find Him, then all manner of things will be well. And Mrs Creasy will come back.

Their search involves visiting and talking to their various neighbours and eavesdropping, trying to untangle enigmatic comments like Mrs Roper’s to Thin Brian: “There’s plenty of people on this avenue who know a lot more than they are letting on.”

A child narrator can be a dangerous thing and for me Cannon does not always get this right.

On several occasions I found myself thinking a 10- year- old would simply not think/ talk/ act like that.

As the plot develops, Cannon introduces more mysteries and her characters reveal themselves and each other to be rather more goatish than the initial semblance of sheep suggests.

What exactly was the case of arson, so frequently referred to?

What is the story behind the missing baby?

Why are the neighbours seemingly so credulous that they believe a splash of creosote near a drainpipe to be an image of Jesus?

Just what are the secrets that each hides and what is the nature of the shared guilt that the disappearance of Margaret Creasy sparks?

Central to much of this is the character of Walter Bishop, the most obvious goat, or perhaps that should be scapegoat.

A bit scruffier, a loner, outcast and despised, Bishop demands our sympathy but commands only the opprobrium of his self- satisfied and smug neighbours. He is different; he must be to blame, “because he just looks the type, doesn’t he?”

Joanna Cannon is very good indeed at recreating the 1970s on a provincial street. The half dozen or so main characters vary in their levels of conviction but they are all recognisable types.

But the book stands or falls by Grace and Tilly.

Tilly, in particular, is a charming and likeable creation and when her moment of dis- appointment occurs we feel her pain.

The Trouble With Goats And Sheep is very well written and Joanna Cannon has a gift for striking metaphors and brief patches of effective and evocative description. There is no doubting her talent and it is no surprise that she was snapped up by The Borough Press and the book heavily promoted.

But all the way through I remained slightly uneasy. The targets were too easy, the children in danger of being too twee and the moral purpose too much to the fore.

For me, they remain the flaws in a book that otherwise justifies all the pre- publication hype.