Novel set in the Midlands (“..1960’s and 70’s has found a trustworthy guide in Joanna Cannon”)

13th June 2016

The Trouble with Goats and Sheep, novel by Joanna Cannon, set in the Midlands int he 1960/70’s.

“The past is another country; they do things differently there,” or at least that’s what L.P. Hartley thought. Personally, I’m not sure. The years certainly appear to change us and the world we live in but really we can’t break with the past – we carry it with us.

I’ve been giving the matter some thought as, “The Trouble with Goats and Sheep,” is a novel set firmly in a street on a housing estate in the English Midlands in the 1960’s and 70’s, an environment sufficiently close to the time and place of my own upbringing for me to recognize some characteristic features. And the estate Cannon describes probably still exists today, although with the addition of a few front porches and kitchen extensions. Perhaps they do do things differently there now – but I doubt it.

In creating this familiar but by-gone world Joanna Cannon name-drops freely, which certainly elicits a wave of nostalgia in me but probably leaves younger readers cold. So, for their benefit here comes a key to some of the references she makes in the first few pages: Harold Wilson (pipe-smoking Labour policitian), Hillman Hunter (not a film star but a British-made car), Angel Delight (powdered dessert which Wikipedia assures me still exists but if so – why?), Space hoppers (children’s toys guaranteed to swell admissions to local Casualty Departments by 20%) and Artic roll (the only appropriate way to finish any meal which starts with a prawn cocktail.)

This is a novel set in the claustrophobic world of respectable, lower-middle and working class homes, where keeping up appearances is an act of will and of self-preservation, where families may seem not to pry, but still take a deep interest in each other’s lives. In it neighbours are united by a shared secret, a shameful event from years before, whose uncovering threatens the precarious suburban harmony.

The Trouble with Goats and Sheep is absorbing, being a sort of cross between Coronation Street and To Kill a Mockingbird – and let’s be honest – that’s not a combination you run across every day. Like the TV soap, you get to learn about the ways individuals shape a place for themselves in their families, how different families interact with each other and how events in the outside word impinge on close-knit communities. And when seen through a child’s eyes the English Midlands, like Harper Lee’s American South, becomes more mysterious, more absurd and more frightening than the adults living there like to acknowledge. Where grown-ups in a small community accept the received wisdom of the group a little too willingly, children become the unwitting force for change with their awkward questions and uncomfortable observations.

This all sounds a bit heavy but in fact the novel is often very funny. It is kids’ views of, and interactions with, their neighbours as they go about trying to solve the disappearance of Mrs Creasy, which made me smile. The author has a great ear for dialogue and her children are treated with sympathy but, thank goodness, without sentimentality. The not-quite-lost world of suburban England in the 1960’s and 70’s has found a trustworthy guide in Joanna Cannon.

Gwyneth for the TripFiction Team.

You can connect with Joanna on Twitter and via her website

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For more top reads set in the MIDLANDS, just click here

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