One of the great difficulties facing politicians who turn their hand to fiction-writing is that reviewers find it extraordinarily difficult to assess their first novel without being heavily influenced by the writer's political persona.
Reviews tend to be about the effrontery of the politician in attempting fiction at all, or about the real identities of characters in what is assumed to be a roman a clef. I suspect this is the reason for the fact that nine out of 10 politicians never produce more than one novel.
Edwina Currie is the exception. She's Laving Home is her third. It's exceptional, too, in its indication of substantial development as a writer. Few writers of mass-market fiction show such measurable development in skill from book to book. Compared to her first novel - a tinkly roundabout of flat stereotypes in a parliamentary setting - her third is a miracle of developing "voice".
It explores the lives of a group of Liverpool schoolgirls during the Beatle years. Centre-stage is Helen Majinsky, a 16-year-old Jewish girl given to sneaking off, unbeknownst to parents or teachers, to the Cavern Club to dance. Helen is bright, hard-working and ambitious.
As the focal point of the book, she allows the writer to explore the lives of Orthodox Jews from the point of view of a questioning teenager. The rituals, food and relationships special to the religion are explored by Edwina Currie with an insider's loving detail. Inevitably, perhaps, Helen falls in love with a goy and is precipitated by the romance into a questioning, not just of the marriage laws of her religion, but of much else that she has been reared to accept.
While the broad conflict presented by the love affair presents the most obvious emotional tension in the book, by far the subtlest issue explored is the relationship of Helen to her parents, particularly her half-willful destruction of her mother's hopes and dreams.
Nowhere in Currie's earlier books was there anything like the insight shown by the author into the guilty perversity of a daughter trying out her intellectual and personality strengths against her demonstrably less clever mother. The mother, buttressed only by a few unchanging certainties, becomes banal and trivial under Helen's ruthless gaze, then pathetic as even the myths of childhood (that Mother is the best cook around) are demolished by the teenager's increasing experience of the wider world.
Currie's major weakness as a novelist is her dialogue. Large sections of the book have characters keeping each other informed about politics, changing times and public personalities. Not only do these short lectures on current affairs slow the pace of the book, but they are invariably cast in the sort of jolly impersonal language one associates with weather forecasts.
Here and there throughout the book there are frankly improbable conversations between teenagers. Sounding like no teenagers I've ever met, they deliver themselves of cogent observations about the changing role of women, the export of talent and the nature of prejudice. The young Americans portrayed also tend to talk a strange mixture of American Midwest and middle-class Brit.
That apart, She's Leaving Home is a satisfying and evocative novel, capturing time, place and generation with the skill of a writer confident both of her sources and of her capacity to involve the reader in the often tragic lives of her developing characters.
Not only has Edwina Currie made the transition from politician to writer; she stands a good chance of becoming that rare thing, a "brand name" mass market author whose work the reader isn't ashamed to be caught reading.
Maire Geoghegan-Quinn is a novelist and an Irish Times columnist
