It Can't Go On - Softcover

The novel opens with Jeremy at yet another drinks party - and this one he oh-so-nearly didn't bother going to. But he meets there Phoebe (or, at least, that's the name he is sure she has told him - but according to her a short while later she's actually called Maria ...and sometimes Marsha: she is both bewildering and utterly captivating). Jeremy is steamrollered by her (literally) devastating allure and succumbs to just anything she wants (but why? he persistently asks himself: it's not as if she's even very nice...).

From here, the 'domino effect' takes over - except that the relentless progression of the plot, like life, is rather less ordered and predictable than a meandering line of preset blocks, duly falling over in strict rotation. The 'pinball effect' is better - the random tangents taken by the ball at speed as it ricochets away from each clanking cushion, to end up God knows where, or when. Jeremy's wife, Anne, orders him out of the house - not because of Phoebe (Maria...Marsha) but on account of her unshakeable belief (is she right? Is she wrong?) that he has been conducting an affair with the nanny of their two children, Adrian and Donna. Soon after, the nanny finds herself out of a job, for the self-same reason, and is therefore flat-hunting - her life turned upside down. In the shared flat she eventually ends up in, she meets people, new people. More lives are affected by the governing yet random pinball machine, and the ripples are spreading ever wider. Seemingly inconsequential characters - a taxi driver and a cashier in a building society, among many others - I follow and explore as a result of their having come into accidental collision with the driving forces of the moment: yet more lives are bruised, enriched, warped or madly altered. The plot is brought around to a satisfying conclusion - but not, of course, an end: because none of us ends just because we have dropped away from sight - and nor do people we have ceased to know or love or even remember simply therefore cease. Anyone we know, we know purely because we met them (husbands, wives, milkmen, head waiters) and everyone else...we simply didn't. The ramifications of this apparently simplistic truism are, of course, totally without limit.

Much absurdity and rich humour arise as a direct result of these glancing blows between humans on their way wherever - as well as, inevitably, sex, pain and puzzlement. Cause results in unguessable effect; at moments of deepest misery or utter elation we are convinced that such states simply can't go on - either because we simply cannot bear them to, or else because it has been dinned into us that all good things must come to an end. And they do. And pain is blunted. But life goes on: it has to.

Fiction Poor Souls, This Is It, Stuff, Summer Things, Winter Breaks, It Can't Go On (Faber and Faber)

Non-Fiction Beside the Seaside ( Mitchell Beazley), All Shook Up: A Flash of the Fifties (Cassell, October 2000)