The Trick to Time by Kit de Waal, book review: Enlightening and moving but feels too rushed

This heart-wrenching love story from the bestselling author of 'My Name Is Leon' has already won a place on the Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist

Kit de Waal is more than just a successful novelist with an internationally bestselling and Costa First Novel Award shortlisted novel under her belt. She famously used the advance she received for her debut to set up a creative writing scholarship for aspiring writers from disadvantaged backgrounds, for whom she’s also since become a powerful voice.

The success of My Name is Leon, the story of a biracial boy navigating the foster care system in 1980s Birmingham, was always going to be a hard act to follow, but her second novel The Trick to Time (which has already won a place on the Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist) does an admirable job.

“There’s a trick to time,” Mona’s Dadda tells his young daughter. “You can make it expand or you can make it contract. Make it shorter or make it longer.” This is something Mona carries with her throughout her life, passing the secret on to others: “You can make the most of what you have,” she tells women in need of her help.

But it’s also a neat way of describing how the structure of the novel itself works. Ostensibly set in the present day in an unnamed southern English seaside town where the now 60-year-old Mona has made her home for the past two decades, folded into events in the present are Mona’s recollections of the past, which, once set loose, swell and unfurl: her childhood in Ireland, the early death of her mother, and life thereafter with her beloved father; then the years she spends in Birmingham in the early 1970s, where she moves to look for work, falls in love (with a young Irishman named William) and gets married.

These episodes set in the city are the strongest in the book, perhaps not surprising since De Waal herself, who was born to an Irish mother and a Caribbean father, grew up amongst the Irish community in Birmingham in the 1960 and 1970s.

The 1964 Birmingham pub bombings loom large, and De Waal details the anti-Irish sentiment that runs high in the aftermath: William is the victim of an unprovoked attack, and his aunts are called “Irish bitches” by policemen when they approach them for help in tracking down their then AWOL nephew. This broader historical and national tragedy is entwined with a personal one that afflicts the young married couple: Mona is delivered of a stillborn baby, the treatment of which is barbaric by today’s standards. “Listen, you have to be quiet, you have to be,” a kindly nurse begs the grief-stricken new mother. “If you keep screaming they send for a psychiatrist and they come and give you a drug to put you out.”

Here, De Waal’s social commentary is both enlightening and moving, but her attempts to tie up loose ends between the past and the present culminate in a dénouement that feels slightly too rushed and contrived to do justice to the tragic tenderness of story that precedes it.

‘The Trick to Time’ by Kit de Waal is published by Viking, £12.99