Searching for Solange

FICTION: Walking on Dry LandBy Denis Kehoe Serpents Tail, 248pp. £10.99

SOMETIMES IT SEEMS as though every new novel is about the uncovering of family secrets, with missing parents, secret children and long-ago betrayals all coming to light. So it’s a mark of how good Denis Kehoe’s exquisitely written new novel, about a young Portuguese woman searching for her biological mother, is that it deftly avoids all cliche and feels utterly fresh and new.

In Walking on Dry LandAna de Castro, who was brought up in Lisbon by her parents, José and Helena, knows from an early age that she is not Helena's biological child. Her birth mother was an Angolan woman with whom her father had an affair when the family were living in the then-Portuguese colony in the 1970s. Ana has always craved information about her biological mother, Solange. Now, after Helena's death, she heads off to Angola to track her down, with nothing more than Solange's name and a photograph that may or may not be of her mother.

The narrative moves between Ana’s quest in the Angolan capital, Luanda, and the development of Helena and José’s relationship in Salazar’s Portugal of the 1960s and 1970s.

When it comes to the Portuguese and Angloan settings, Kehoe throws the reader in at the deep end: there's no clumsy exposition about the political situations in either country. And though I knew a bit about Salazar's regime, until reading this book I had no idea Angola was still a Portuguese colony well into the 1970s. But Kehoe, a Dubliner whose debut novel, Nights Beneath the Nation, was published in 2008, tells the story with such skill that the reader effortlessly grasps the basics, and is absorbed into this fascinating and sometimes unsettling world.

It’s an extraordinarily visual book, with even the mostly briefly mentioned of locations coming vividly to life, including Dublin, where Ana now lives but that is referred to only in passing. (The walls of an Angolan building are compared to “the blue and grey stained pink of a January twilight in Dublin” – a beautifully evocative image.) The reader sees the smoky silver art-deco bars of Lisbon, their customers including “old ladies in heavy, expensive jewellery dragging them towards the grave”, sees the bland supermarkets, lively nightclubs, crumbling colonial buildings and brightly painted houses of Luanda, the city that Ana slowly comes to see “as a place, a space, reconfigured, re-Africanised; not simply just a corpse of a colonial city”.

Ana is a lecturer in film, and both her experiences and those of her parents are filtered through a cinema-lover's gaze. As her quest progresses Ana sees herself as the detective in a film noir; she compares her reunion with her biological mother with the classic weepie Stella Dallas. The young Helena dreams of looking like Julie Christie in Darling,while José reads Cahiers du Cinémaand dresses like Jean-Paul Belmondo. The couple's trip to Paris is presented as a French new-wave film. This approach could have felt forced, but it never does; instead it evokes the heightened drama, the perfect style, of the films Kehoe mentions.

His luminous prose also tells a gripping story. We know from the start that Ana is not the biological child of both her parents; we know she wants to find her birth mother. But the outcome of her quest is never predictable. When Ana and her birth mother finally do meet it’s not a fairy-tale reunion. But nor is it a disaster.

Instead it's something that feels a lot like real life, with all its complications, mixed feelings and never-to-be-answered questions. And that's what makes Walking on Dry Landso good. This is a moving, complex and engrossing novel that deserves many readers.

Anna Carey is a freelance journalist. Her debut young-adult novel, The Real Rebecca,has just been published by the O'Brien Press