DISOBEDIENCE
by Naomi Alderman
Viking £12.99 pp260

The narrator of Tania Unsworth’s second novel is a woman called Sophie who grew up in Cambridge in the 1970s and went to the town-centre secondary school. All of which makes her practically identical to this reviewer, who may therefore be biased, overcome by temps perdu at each mention of brown school skirts and Lion Yard library. Cambridge the city has not appeared much in print, overshadowed as it is by the university. Before We Began restores Woolworths and Jesus Green swimming pool to their rightful places at the heart of the Cambridge experience.

As an adult, Sophie has moved to Oxford, where she works as the manager of a quiet city bookshop. Life grows unexpectedly eventful when she arrives at work one day to find her assistant has hanged himself. The death propels her back to a shocking incident from her youth. In scrupulous, occasionally stilted prose, Unsworth describes the summer that led to the disaster.

At 14, Sophie is, like most teenage girls, incapable of meaningful life away from her friends. She has two: racy, foul-mouthed Julia, and subdued, inscrutable Nancy. The three girls like to lounge together in a shed in Julia’s garden, smoking pilfered cigarettes. But bored adolescent girls and trouble go together like shoplifting and make-up counters, and soon enough the tragedy occurs. It’s inevitable, yet still shocking, which is to Unsworth’s credit.

If Townie Cambridge has not had much of a showing in fiction, Orthodox Jewish Hendon, might as well not even exist. Naomi Alderman’s first novel, Disobedience, has the task of outing the place and the culture in which the author grew up. She does it beautifully.

This is another story of adolescent girlfriends — but these girls, Esti and Ronit, wear sleeves down to their wrists, and woolly tights even in summer. They are teenagers in a world where men pray, “Blessed are you, Lord, our God, King of the Universe, Who did not make me a woman”, and the women respond: “Blessed are you, Lord, our God, King of the Universe, Who made me according to his will”. As adolescents, Esti and Ronit fell secretly in love. Now, as adults, everything is different. Ronit has quit Orthodoxy and Hendon to become a trouser-wearing financier in New York. Esti has stayed and married their childhood friend, Dovid — a man who, incidentally, suffers from the best- described migraines in fiction.

The notion of “Orthodox Jewish Hendon” is a tricky one to sell; even the addition of lesbians, as in “this is a novel about lesbians in Orthodox Jewish Hendon”, is unlikely to set a publicity department on fire. But it is a wonderful novel. There is wonder in the plotting, which presents Esti and Ronit together or apart in ways that defy conventional expectation. But the real wonder is in Alderman’s capacity for original thinking. Nothing is quite as the lazy-minded might expect it to be: forbidden desire is not unequivocally good, deterministic religion is not unequivocally bad. Orthodoxy (as much as Ronit’s dissent from it) absolutely glows out of the pages of Disobedience, as rich and fresh and fascinating as this lovely novel itself.

Available at Books First prices of £9.89 (Unsworth) and £11.69 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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