Coming together in the city’s green space

Clay
by Melissa Harrison
(Bloomsbury, £14.99)

A sliver of green in a grey city is the principal setting of journalist Melissa Harrison’s debut novel. This wedge-shaped park binds together her small cast: TC, a nine-year-old who skips school but is scarcely missed, Jozef, a fortysomething Pole in exile and mourning his family farm, and two generations of a family: widow Sophia who lives in the local estate and her pen pal granddaughter Daisy, who lives behind a dove grey door on a much plusher road. Largely overlooked by others, the park is for them a place of solace, escape or freedom.

TC is Harrison’s most compelling creation. A lonely boy on “intimate terms with the earth”, he is captivated by animal droppings and mysterious footprints, a love of nature bestowed on him by his now absent father. The park also gives TC a rare taste of companionship: both with fellow lost soul Jozef despite their age gap, and with privately educated Daisy, despite their privilege gap. But it is also the formation of these relationships that acts as a catalyst to scatter each of them away from the park.

The way Harrison weaves the threads of her story together has echoes of John Lanchester’s much-praised recent novel Capital but Clay is less ambitious in scope and more gentle. The power of Harrison’s writing lies in the telling detail. Linda, Sophia’s daughter, believes that her mother grieved little for Linda’s father Henry yet Sophia wears his too-big brogues that she cannot bear to throw out and her heart leaps at the sound of the latch when “for a moment, just for a moment, she had thought it was Henry letting himself in”.

Harrison has a gift too for exploring human bonds. In Sophia’s relationship with Daisy there is that common affinity between grandchild and grandparent, a conspiracy of secrets against the generation in the middle. Yet you also witness the casual cruelty a child can unthinkingly dole out even where there appears to be unconditional love.

It is in the descriptive passages that Harrison’s lyrical style shines brightest, though. As the seasons shift, the park comes to life: freshly planted bulbs are “an irresistible challenge” to the local squirrels, the oaks “bleed” a rusty sap and are scored by the teeth of weapon dogs and foxes are “neat sepia shapes that flicker silently at the edges of the local dogs’ knowing and haunt the margins of their dreams”. Clay is an assured debut novel, that reads like the work of a much more experienced author. Expect great things of Harrison.

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