Landfall by Helen Gordon – review

Landfall author Helen Gordon. Photograph: Nick Tucker

Landfall is a dark and comic portrayal of a young woman’s search for meaning in the face of loss and emotional detachment. Alice Robinson embarks on a journey from the concrete warehouses and vodka-fuelled nights of life in east London, back to the time-warp suburbia of her childhood and finally to a wild and formidable coastline where she confronts the notions of England as an island, of loneliness and of being on the edge.

Alice is a thirty-something art critic and editor of Meta magazine (insert Granta if you will), living in a warehouse unit of the Hackney Wick variety. She drinks in recognisable Shoreditch pubs and has endless undefined affairs with men she barely knows or doesn’t really like.

After a disastrous appearance on a cultural affairs radio show and with the magazine facing closure due to economic pressure, Alice finds herself jobless. She retreats, somewhat reluctantly, to the suburbs where she grew up, to look after the family home whilst her parents embark on a round-the-world trip.

This unaltered place of her childhood evokes memories of her sister Janey who disappeared from a park when they were teenagers, never to be seen again. Amongst her mother’s chintzy ornaments and the hollow quietness of the semi-urban landscape Alice realises that her life, and the writing that she has become well-regarded for, has lost all meaning. Her young American cousin Emily is forced upon her by a recently-remarried aunt and the two drift around in states of detached self-involvement.

After months of declining commissions from editors in the city, Alice agrees to interview the elusive and revered artist Karin Ericsson. This job takes her to the Sussex coast where Ericsson resides in a dilapidated wooden doll’s house. Alice reaches the very precipice of the island and her own emotional stalemate.

Gordon begins with a comically wry depiction of contemporary east London and its inhabitants: “Callum was one of those men of a certain haircut, who gravitated to the east of the city”, and the physical landscape, its “unprettified canals and blockish concrete industrial units” make for a brutal backdrop. But in places the descriptions are so localised, so very much now, that it’s both comfortingly relevant and at times a hindrance from full immersion in the narrative.

The variations in pace and language nicely reflect Alice’s emotional and geographical circumstances – from the slow amble through her suburban surroundings to the climactic tension of a hot July on the Sussex coast. A motley crew of peripheral characters, from the loping ex-boyfriend of Alice’s long-lost teenage sister, a now divorced car salesman, to the hyper health-conscious Californian cousin, make for other interesting examples of loneliness.

Gordon, who was an associate editor at Granta magazine and hails from the suburb of Croydon, creates a narrative built on layers of emotional loss and lack, written in sharp, often droll, prose that takes us through the multiple landscapes of contemporary England.

Landfall is published this month by Penguin
ISBN: 9780141969664
RRP: £12.99