When you fall in love with a character from a book, your fondest wish is to stay with them, enjoy their company and see where they go next.
It’s a natural reaction to any character who leaps off the page and into your heart, or indeed any person you meet who comes to mean a great deal, and unfortunately for whole variety of reasons, it’s not always answered, perhaps because their story has reached a natural end point, or the author is ready to move on and understandably see which other characters may be lying in wait in their imagination, eager to spring to word-filled life.
But in the case of one Evie Epworth, who we first come to know and love in the delightfully rich and meaningful novel, The Miseducation of Evie Epworth, there’s a lot more story to tell which author Matson Taylor does with warm, gusto and sense of garrulous fun in All About Evie as he takes back to the anything is possible days of 1972 London.
Approximately a decade after a happily ambitious Evie leaves the farm in Yorkshire where she grew up with her dad Arthur (now joined his French lady friend Élise) and neighbours like the motherly Mrs Scott-Pym (her glamourously extrovert daughter Caroline is her ticket to London, along with her great love, Digby, a woman of amazing taste and personality too), and Mrs Swithenbank, she is happily ensconced at the BBC as an assistant producer in radio and alive to all the possibilities the city has to offer.
Always bedecked in the latest fashion, and in love with the Beatles, Joni Mitchell and Battenberg cakes, Evie is a quintessential young Londoner on the rise, as sweet and lovely as ever but very much at home in an urban setting that’s a million miles from the happy surrounds of her idyllic rural childhood.
Back in my flat, I put the milk bottle I’d picked up from outside in the fridge and stick the kettle on. While I wait for the water to boil I pick up my job list from the kitchen table. There, sparkling like a set of Christmas lights, is
6. Something arty (but not opera)
Well, you can get anything much artier than working in an art gallery can you? I’m obviously meant to leave the sound monitors and headphone amps behind me and start a new life full of glamorous opening nights and penniless but handsome artists.
It’s all very exciting.
Much like Mary Tyler Moore, Evie has made it – a career very much on the rise, a leatherette briefcase in hand and an Ossie Clark poncho giving her that fashionable edge, and a gaggle of friends and possibilities that attest to the power of friendship and togetherness.
Hers is a world full of hope and belonging, and while some recent grief has taken some of the shine off things, while she has her job, her friends like Caroline & Digby, and newly arrived on the scene Lolo, a producer at BBC3 radio who may not be what Evie assumed, and the sense that if this life, she has it firmly in her grip.
But as anyone who is navigating, or has navigated their twenties will attest, it’s a messy time of upheaval as you work out who you are and who you want to be, and while Evie rides this rollercoaster better than most, she still comes a-cropper, most spectacularly when Princess Anne visits the studios and imbibes something that is mostly not on the menu and with which Evie has an unfortunate career-ending association.
When all her grand plans and sense of surety end up in a messy mash at the bottom of a Hornsea Pottery mug, Evie has no choice but to pick herself and reinvent her life which she does with the buoyant wherewithal we have come to expect from this most joyously delightful of protagonists.
The joy of Evie has always been, and continues to be in All About Evie, that she never lets herself be defeated by life, and while there are plenty of times when things seem to be dark and hope is lost – Evie is human and what makes her so more appealing than she already is is that Taylor is happy to let her be in those dark places we’ve all been when possibility seems to have fled our presence, never to return – she rises up and whether it’s a stint in an art gallery which is fun but her type of creative endeavour, or working on a weekly magazine where she finds her people and place, continues to believe life will take her somewhere good.
While Caroline and Digby are very much along for the ride in All About Evie, with Digby’s backstory beautifully explored in chapters interspersed with the main narrative, the Yorkshire gang feature mainly in judiciously placed cameos which work beautifully to bolster the fact that everything we love about this remarkable young woman comes from an upbringing rich in love, belonging and caring support, the very kind that she now shares with others such as Mrs Swithenbank’s grand-niece, Geneviève, a would-be fashion designer who finds her home, literally and emotionally with Evie, and also Caroline and Digby who quickly adopt her as their own.
Geneviève’s mouth goes round and round and up and down and round and round and up and down.
And then her glittery eyes open wide and when I look inside them I see pure joy.
‘Oh, that’s delicious,’ she says, already twisting another forkload.
My job is done.
Full of life, vigour, hope and the delirious sense that good things this way will come even when everything points to the contrary being true, All About Evie is a vivacious story of what can happen if you simply hold fast to the idea that life has a good deal more to offer than bog standard misery.
Evie never even countenances anything other than the fact that she will triumph, but this is not borne of an arrogance or a sense that she deserves anything; rather Evie, alive with a buoyant of spirit and an inclusivity of kindness and creativity that naturally draws people to her, simple approaches life with the wholly infectious idea that the world is more glorious than not and things just seem to then fall into place.
Brimming with rom-com brio (including hilarious snapshots of the men who didn’t make the grade), Mary Tyler Moore-ish optimistic feminism that is more than up to coping with the misogyny of the day and a glowing sense that friendship, family and love can conquer anything, All About Evie is a tonic for the soul, a novel that admits to the fact that life can be hard and sad and terrible at times, but that that is far from the end of a very possible story.
While the ending might lead you to believe this is the end of Evie’s story, you can only hope it isn’t because she is so alive, so wonderful, such a joy to be with in her raw, unfiltered and endlessly hopeful humanity that you want to see with all your heart where she goes next, knowing deep down that you won’t hesitate to go with her and see what else this vivaciously good, if flawed, thing called life can do (especially when you’re as open to the new and the possible as kindhearted Evie), and what might lie just around the corner of a street filled with double-decker buses, fabulous fashion and people who will soon be family, and maybe more.