Miss Marple always maintained that her phenomenal capacity for solving complex crimes was down to the fact that she lived in a village; being in close proximity to a fairly small group of people in an insular community apparently having provided her with seemingly infinite examples of the negative side of human nature. No matter what crime she became embroiled in, Miss Marple was always reminded of some parallel incident from her own past living in the delightful yet unexpectedly fraught St. Mary Mead. This idea that anything can, and probably will, happen in an English village populated by an eccentric cast of oddballs and outcasts has been embraced wholeheartedly by Louis de Bernieres in his most recent book, Notwithstanding. After a French friend of his pointed out that Britain is like “an immense lunatic asylum”, de Bernieres cast his mind back to his youth and to the village in Surrey where he grew up in the 60s and 70s. Although Notwithstanding is clearly fiction rather than autobiography, de Bernieres drew upon his memories of village life and the eclectic mix of characters that lived in the vicinity to write this delightful collection of stories about an England he believes to have all but vanished.

The central character in Notwithstanding is the village itself, a village where “strange things happen from time to time”. While on the surface the village might seem like a pleasant, tranquil place to live, the threat of destruction that hangs over the countryside and the ever present incidents of death that are found wherever the presence of man intrudes upon nature fills the pages. As de Bernieres notes, the roads in and out of the village are “scarlet with gory pancakes that had once been rabbits, kittens and hedgehogs”. However, despite the flaws that exist in the village, there is an undeniable heart and warmth to the community that draws the reader into the lives of the villagers immediately.

The stories of Notwithstanding are tales where the eccentric becomes normal. Whether he is describing a spiritualist who shares her cottage with her sister and the ghost of her husband, a gun-toting cross-dresser, a crotchety old lady writing her Christmas cards, a young boy out fishing, or even the village’s last peasant who “exudes the aromas of wet leather and house manure”, de Bernieres creates a marvellously plausible world where people are accepted for whatever and whoever they are. In this village anything goes, just don’t expect the villagers to comment on it.

The village of Notwithstanding is an ideal microcosm in which to explore the quirkier side of human nature. As the Divine Comedy once said, “all human life is here, from the feeble old dear to the screaming child”. De Bernieres clearly has a massive sentimental attachment to the village where he grew up and to the people and lifestyle there that he believes has fallen so out of fashion in recent years. Just as he loved his own time spent in a village, de Bernieres loves Notwithstanding and the characters who dwell there, which does mean that their stories often have a distinctly sentimental tone. De Bernieres wants the reader to love the villagers or, at the very least, to understand them and to grasp the underlying motivation behind their seemingly strange words and deeds.

Of course, a village that may well seem quaint and provincial at first glance could well be a hotbed of anger, hatred and sordid, salacious secrets. Even a tertiary glance at an episode of Midsomer Murders will quickly confirm this. For this reason, even when it seems that de Bernieres is slipping into a sentimental wallow in nostalgia, there are often darker forces at work in the stories of Notwithstanding. For example, an unrepentant, militant nudist may well inspire laughter but the situation takes on an entirely different perspective if, rather than fighting for the freedom to celebrate the human form, the nudism in question is in fact due to loneliness and the onset of Alzheimer’s. While it could never be described as edgy, incidents like this elevate Notwithstanding from cosy fluff to a nuanced and convincing deconstruction of life and how to live. Notwithstanding was a lot of fun with some excellent comedy moments but it was still a surprising and emotional read that left me wondering what the villagers would get up to next.

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