(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
Growing isn’t easy at the best of times, but it becomes even darkly and challengingly problematic when the person doing the growing up is doing in the very late 1970s in northeast England at a time when the Yorkshire Ripper is terrorising a fearful populace with their seemingly random killings.
In this climate of fever-pitch fear and rampant paranoia – anyone could be the killer and with women abducted and killed at a range of different locations (though often near nightspots), people began to live ever more insular lives in a frantic bid to try and protect themselves – Miv (short for Mavis), the lovably enthusiastic protagonist of The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey, is doing her best to get through life as a twelve-year-old in some truly testing personal circumstances.
Her mother has had a nervous breakdown and is mute and unresponsive much of the time, her father is working hard to provide for the family while juggling the emotional cost of a marriage in limbo, and her Aunt Jean, her dad’s sister, has moved ostensibly to help out but with an irascible attitude and a distinct lack of affection, Miv finds her more of an emotional hindrance than a help.
That’s a lot for one budding teenager to have on her plate, and while she has a close friend Sharon for support, who is as worldly and better off as Miv remains child-like and innocent (though she understands more than you might, even if it is still filtered through some wonkily filtered lens), Miv feels alone and lovely and well and truly unable to control much, if anything about her life.
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That lack of control and a full understanding of what precisely is fuelling the quietly distressing lack of warmth and balance in her family’s dynamics, is likely what propels Miv to begin her list which documents a number of suspicious people, pretty much all men, who might be the killer adding an extra layer of fear-fuelled complexity to life in towns already bearing the brunt of a prolonged economic downturn.
While Sharon soon tires of Miv’s eager pursuit of their mission to find the killer and stays along for most of the ride simply out of the BFF loyalty, the narrative of The List of Suspicious Things is powered by Miv’s quest, its inherent darkness balancing nicely with the sweet, charming buoyancy of a YA-level coming-of-age drama.
It will not surprise you to learn that Miv does not in fact catch the Yorkshire Ripper – that comes down to pure luck and happenstance, the identity of the killer, Peter Sutcliffe, part of the finale’s pleasingly completist wrap-up of events – but what she does do is uncover some very dark elements in a society long used to a bleak outlook and by doing so, accelerates her growing up more than might have happened otherwise.
(courtesy University of Bristol)
Full of the lingua franca of Yorkshire and a sense of distinct part of England laid lovingly large, The List of Suspicious Things is as much social critique as it is a mystery waiting to be solved and one young girl discovering that perhaps life can be fixed or solved simply because you want it to be.
In the course of her mission to unmask the Ripper, Miv lays bare some other troubling aspects of life in her hometown including entrenched racism, pedophilia and marriages defined not by love and care but by gaslit abuse.
It’s a steep learning curve for Miv, who is gutsy, thoughtful and kind to such a wonderful degree that you will fall in love with her as a lead character, but though she makes some reasonably big mistakes thanks to over-eagerness and a patent lack of awareness about how the world really works, she also grows as a person and assembles around her, quite by accident, a found community that has come to enrich her life but also of its members too.
In fact, one of the enduringly pleasing things about The List of Suspicious Things is how the local Pakistani-British shopkeeper, Mr Bashir and his son Ishtiaq, who are targets of loose tongues and racially-laced harassment, and the librarian, Helen Andrews, where Miv and Sharon go to investigate the suspicious people and places on their list, soon become almost members of the family.
The assemblage of these people and others like Arthur the local rag-n-bone man, not only helps heal those within its orbit but play an instrumental role in Miv coming to understand and fully appreciate what lies at the broken heart of her own ailing, if haphazardly loving, family.
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For a novel that wears its acknowledgement of the darkness of the world well and truly on its beautifully written sleeves, The List of Suspicious Things also embraces a great deal of life’s kindness and generosity too.
While lesser authors might’ve been tempted to apply some sort of sparkly fairytale polish and sheen to Miv’s story, taking all that darkness, sadness and loss and waving a narrative wand so it’s not so bad, after all, Godfrey balances the dark and the light perfectly, letting each breath as they need to.
The result is a novel which delves deep into society’s underbelly and which knows there are no easy fixes to any of it, but which also keeps a firm and compelling eye on the fact that in the midst of distress and chaos and societal lowpoints, there is the possibility of connection, belonging and maybe even love.
These might seem like trite, cutesy things to inject a story of dark, troubling substance, but in the hands of Godfrey, these qualities are muscular and meaningful, adding a hopeful depth to The List of Suspicious Things which persists and grows throughout its utterly beguiling length, and reminding us with poignancy, bright humour and a grounded positivity, that though life can be dark and terrible indeed, there is light at the end of the tunnel and hope that things can and will, in life-changing ways, get better.