A grain merchant’s family uproot themselves from their life in Riga and are scattered. Like seeds on the wind, some will make it to fertile ground and others will find themselves in inhospitable terrain, or buffeted here and there by unpredictable currents, some destructive, some surprisingly helpful. Linda Grant’s ninth novel continues her exploration of how chance, contingency and unintended consequences intersect with history’s larger movements; how personal narratives are shaped not merely by what we think of as inescapable forces and events, but by moments of randomness and whimsy. Her characters are, as ever, mobile not only in a geographical sense, but in the way that their desires and motivations shift and adapt, influenced by memories of the past and intimations of the future.
What lies beneath the journey of members of the Mendel family from Latvia to Liverpool over a century ago is unclear or, at least, determined by multiple overlapping factors. A young girl, Mina, has wandered into the forest, basket in hand, in search of mushrooms; what she has discovered is a group of young men, aspiring Bolsheviks, full of anti-tsarist fury and a passion for change. The suspicion that something traumatic, violent, possibly sexual, has befallen her passes immediately into the realm of folk tale, and it may indeed be that nothing at all has happened beyond the creation of a catalyst – both for Mina’s brother Jossel, who grasps the opportunity to sketch out a plan for emigration and resettlement, and for Grant, who can transform an obscure origin story into a lively, many-stranded generational saga.
Like all good stories, it teems with false starts, mysterious clues and dead ends; its propulsiveness is the more potent because of the times the engine of the story appears to stall. Mina and Jossel have their hearts set on America, but get no further than the shores of Merseyside and, specifically, the suburbs of Brownlow Hill and Allerton. Here, life appears to claim them and pin them down, quickly, irreversibly: marriages are made, frequently without any obvious intentionality, names change, children are born, houses are populated. In the shadows lurk other characters, most notably Mina and Jossel’s malevolent brother Itzik, a gatherer and hoarder of information to be deployed to his advantage and at his discretion. On even more distant shores, in the chaotic dispossessions and displacements of the 20th century, other figures are lost entirely from the record, their stories destined to remain unknown and untold. “Some people,” reflects Mina’s daughter, “don’t make it out of their times. Or if they do, they just linger, maimed and useless like a fly without its wings.”
Grant’s particular gift is for the arresting scene that blends menace with comedy. Her portrait of the Jewish community of Allerton, taut with a sense of claustrophobia in which the fear of discovery breeds secrecy and silence, is made up of such scenes, including a bravura description of Mina’s visit to the local hair salon during which she is subjected to the attentions of its predatory proprietor and the goings-on in his back room, another version of the dark forest. It’s a short scene with a brilliant twist that I shan’t spoil, but suffice to say it offers a whole new take on the world of foot fetishism. Elsewhere, a plump young man recoils in horror as he is all but dragged to his wedding, his reluctance fully understood only much later in the novel; a conceited BBC radio announcer, drunk on his belief in his own bohemianism and intellectual superiority, is roughed up mercilessly; a pair of fly-by-night Soho film-makers alight on the commercial possibilities of Mina’s foundational myth; and younger generations of the Mendel, or Mendel-adjacent, family find themselves striking out for new territories. With them, they carry the repeated, elaborated and embellished stories handed down, told and retold whether or not they are true, stories that sustain and entertain but whose real meaning, like so much of history, it is far too early to divine.
• The Story of the Forest by Linda Grant is published by Virago (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
