Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan review – lyrical tale of a family accused

Ordinary Human Failings is a considerably more interesting book than it claims to be. It’s pitched as a procedural thriller of sorts – an unsolved murder, the cops closing in, an ambitious journalist snooping around. While there may be a depressing commercial logic to this framing, it does the novel scant justice; those plot elements amount to little more than a deftly handled framing device. Beyond lies a subtle, accomplished and lyrical study of familial and intergenerational despair, a quiet book about quiet lives. And it also happens to be an excellent novel: politically astute, furious and compassionate. It’s considerably better than Nolan’s first novel, the acclaimed Acts of Desperation – worth stating, given our neophilic literary culture’s obsession with debuts and novelty.

Set mostly in the early 1990s, it tells the story of the Greens, a family of Irish immigrants who have moved to London in the hope of escaping the social stigma of daughter Carmel’s teenage pregnancy and her brother Ritchie’s escalating alcoholism. Judged reclusive and odd by their new neighbours, the Greens are easy scapegoats when tragedy visits their estate. As we gradually learn more about the psychological and structural forces that have shaped the family, a picture emerges of lives foreclosed; of youthful audacity hardening into resignation and resentment, fresh starts rendered heavy by old habit, sadnesses handed from parent to child like cursed heirlooms.

The overall effect is claustrophobic and relentlessly melancholic, but that is not to say that the novel is one-note. It is testament to Nolan’s ability as a writer that she is able to wring so much nuance and power out of an emotional palette consisting mostly of greys and blues. Ordinary Human Failings is an achievement of shade and texture, and perhaps above all else an achievement in saying some of the plain, earnest things we are often too embarrassed to say – that what might seem a perfectly normal life can nonetheless feel empty or insufficient, that sometimes it’s impossible not to feel you are wasting all that you have been given.

There is often a lacuna in the cultural timeline of post-1980s Britain, a concertina effect that sees stories leap directly from the dying embers of the Thatcher regime to the short-lived hope of New Labour and the dull drumbeat of Britpop. But there is half a decade in between that is too rarely accounted for artistically, with notable exceptions in the cases of early Patrick Keiller or Naked-era Mike Leigh. It’s precisely that period that is most closely evoked by Nolan, who brilliantly recreates a nation still wounded from the rapid dismantling of the postwar social consensus, a London of dingy hotels and greasy spoons, conversations over halves of bitter or the coveted family landline.

Setting the novel in the early 1990s allows Nolan to explore the toxic media culture of the time, with tabloids all too eager to make a grotesque spectacle of poverty and suffering in order to sell newspapers. Nolan’s writing is especially strong in this area, reaching beyond liberal pearl-clutching and towards something altogether more material in its analysis. The character of Tom, a young reporter who has already internalised the amoral logic of his profession, could have read as easy caricature – the seedy journalist who will do anything for a story. Instead he is an equivocal figure, not entirely unsympathetic but ultimately unable to see past his own class position and recognise that the reality in front of him is not a morality tale but a mundane patchwork of ambient despair. Elsewhere Nolan is excellent on the fungibility of working-class bodies broken by wage labour and then quickly forgotten.

This is also a novel about addiction and alcoholism, and one that approaches the subject with rare insight. Nolan is superb on the bargaining that often goes hand in hand with substance abuse. Her characters make endless rules to govern their consumption – certain drinks in certain quantities at certain times. They spot patterns in the drinking of others, notice that their own lives are getting smaller by the glass. It’s heavy stuff, but it’s well earned.

Nolan describes the Greens as having “ordinary human failings, tragedies too routine to be of note”. But in this deeply tender book, she not only notes those tragedies, she also bears witness to them. To do so is an act of compassion. To do so with such grace is a genuine achievement.

• Keiran Goddard is the author of Hourglass (Abacus). Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.