Charm is an underrated quality in fiction, perhaps because it’s seen as a soft power, unlike supposedly more rigorous features such as plot and structure. It comes from an alchemical blend of elements including narrative voice and character, and Tom Lamont’s debut novel, Going Home, set in the Jewish community in Enfield, north London, has charm to burn.
Largely, this comes from the central character, a two-year-old boy named Joel, whose scattershot viewpoint opens the book. “He collects answers to your questions. Joel Woods. Two! Salt-and-vinegar flavour.” He’s playing in the park and the voice sketches his distractible vision (“Joel saw another bird. Right, you”) while dealing just enough information to the reader.
Best of all, Lamont – an award-winning Observer and Guardian journalist before turning to fiction – rations Joel’s appearances carefully and we don’t get his viewpoint for the rest of the novel. He remains the central character, however, simply because the four people we do hear from are all focused on him.
First come Téo Erskine and his father, Vic. Téo is a young man who has come back to Enfield from the city to see his dad, who’s living with a degenerative condition. “One of the surname illnesses. Your slow declines.” Téo used to go to school with Lia, Joel’s single mother, and is still sweet on her. He babysits Joel for her sometimes, less out of altruism than hoping Lia will be impressed with “the value he was demonstrating”.
Lia sees Téo as responsible – a planner and a plodder – so she may never see him any other way. His friend and opposite is Ben Mossam, a rich kid whose parents moved away and left him their big house; he can afford to be impetuous. He wears a yarmulke not because he is a particularly observant Jew but because “he appreciated how it made women curious, and how it put men on their guard”. (Oddly, the words jew and jewish in the novel are presented thus, and never capitalised.)
The story cycles between Téo, Vic, Ben and Sibyl, a new local rabbi, and the story has so many developments – some unexpected, others foreseeable – that it’s impossible for a reviewer to go far into the plot. But Joel stays with Téo longer than expected and the meat of the book is their growing relationship, both aided and impeded by Vic, Ben and Sibyl. Vic’s sections are among the strongest, portraying his own masculine upbringing as well as offering one of the book’s more surprising hairpin bends. Ben is harder for Lamont to animate, given his shtick is to be smug and broadly unsympathetic.
Along the way we get nice observations on modern life (“people were coming out of the cafe holding [...] sensational coffees, comedy coffees, too heavy to lift one-handed”), but the book always springs to life when Joel is on the page, whether sweetly articulating himself while playing I-spy (“something beginner will … blue”) or giving the other characters perspective. “Joel viewed anybody older, taller, as expert. [He] was the only person in Vic’s life who didn’t hold his illness against him.”
And all the while, each character accelerates towards the end of their own story and all four head for a convergence. There are moments along the way that strain plausibility, but these don’t seem to matter in a book that succeeds so strongly through its charm and its heart.
• Going Home by Tom Lamont is published by Sceptre (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
