Non-return

Set shortly after World War II in London, the book’s narrator is a young man who works as a draughtsman at a prosperous firm, but who dreams of writing poetry about, and for, the working class. His father has simply given up on work following a shipwreck in the Mediterranean in which he was one of the few survivors, and he spends his days gardening in his allotment, while the narrator’s mother supports the family.

The narrator advances in his firm, falls in and out of love, his parents pass, and he eventually marries and has a daughter with his wife Glynis, who eventually leaves the family to join a protest movement that is fighting to keep tactical nuclear weapons out of Britain.

The main narrative is broken up by several short stories that are connected in abstruse ways to the main plot—one a short vignette about a different employee at the firm; another which seems to suggest that the narrator faked the discovery of his poems in the rubble of a biscuit manufacturer, and wrote a pseudonymous introduction to the collection—and which cast the events of the plot in a different light, sometimes altering and sometimes reaffirming the reader’s understanding of the story.

The writing is very strong throughout, and Vaughan manages to operate in many different modes very easily, whether it’s capturing the joking and competitive banter at the firm, or the elegiac tone of reflection of a life lived:

Was my fate sealed when I first donned my draughtsman’s white coat whose cuffs already bore those successively bleached pen-strokes speaking of my predecessors, of histories trodden in strange sands? All the complex motivations of our early lives: they flare up, fade, die or are re-structured, and they leave us with the consequences of our choices, the residue, the arbitrary reality of residence or relationships: all the passions, for example, not to mention flukes of fortune, many of them forgotten, which ended up with me beached here in this flat I never chose by love.

Non-return is one of those novels that is less plot driven than impressionistic, less concerned with drawing the reader in through action than in sketching the contours of life. When it succeeds, it’s very strong, especially in those times when the narrative circled back on itself in subtle ways though images or repetitions, but there are moments that drag a bit, when I felt that I was pushing through simply to push through. This was especially true for me during the short story segments, which were hit-or-miss. I found them more confusing than enlightening, although I imagine a second and third reading would reveal a structure that would make them much more understandable.

Overall, this is a strong effort, but I’d recommend starting with Vaughan’s Totes Meer, which is a little shorter and more approachable.

Non-return
By Dai Vaughan
Seren Books
252 pgs. £7.99