When you’ve made your name writing erudite, complex historical novels that look with detached compassion on human foibles, it’s never going to be easy to navigate a more contemporary passage without sacrificing some of the control that comes with reconstructing a passed world. In short, in contemporary fiction the reader is an equal in experience to the author, so the author had better be damn convincing.
‘Serious Things’ leaps back and forth in the life of Bruno Jackson from his 1990s minor public school, diminishing daily amid the under-siege splendour of the South Downs, to the equally delusory world of the disappointed north London grad set. It’s at a typically excruciating soirée that Bruno’s self-loathing is interrupted by a chance meeting with Anthony, the long-lashed object of his schoolboy crush and only surviving party to a tormenting secret that has left Bruno’s interior life misshapen by guilt and fear of intimacy. Their schoolboy friendship is revealed against a backdrop of casual childish Darwinism and elevated by the patronage of Mr Bridge, an ecologically committed English teacher who finds in their outsider status a mirror of his own dissatisfaction. That his fate will depend on his negotiation of the boys’ fragile egos seems clear from the moment he favours them with his attention.
In the threatened demi-monde of the school there’s a near-run, risky dalliance with the kind of fanciful tosh beloved of Stephen Poliakoff, but unlike Poliakoff – and what puts ‘Serious Things’ beyond the reach of over-promoted soap opera – there is robust, believable dialogue that binds the protagonists to one another. And if the ecological message is sometimes delivered with a heavy hand, Norminton has succeeded in creating a plausible contemporary take on the power of indiscretion and shared secrets that should leave most, if not all, of his readers satisfied.
