Lady Chatterley’s Lover and US politics collide in an enjoyable widescreen novel comprising real and fictional characters over half a century
Alison MacLeod’s arresting new novel begins with the ostensible serendipity of two historic triumphs: within the same week, Kennedy won the US presidential election and Lady Chatterley’s Lover won the right to publication in the UK. Each contest had seemed knife-edge but both in fact marked a long-overdue demolition of conservatism in the face of postwar reinvention. So perhaps less coincidental and more that Kennedy and Penguin were both children of the 20th century.
From this rather glorious collision, MacLeod works backwards to weave stories out of a wide cast of individuals, both real and fictional, all of whom played a part in that awakening. The result is a widescreen, 600-page book, taking the reader from Sussex in 1915 via New York in the late 1950s through to that final day at the Old Bailey in November 1960. This is a documentary-style novel in the tradition of John Dos Passos or Vasily Grossman, with tinges of Didion and Mailer to brighten the way.