In Phillip Larkin’s poem, ‘High Windows’, the speaker looks in on a changing 1960s Britain and finds it impossible to describe the newly-found freedom he witnesses in words. Instead an image comes to mind that is bewildering rather than liberating in its vastness:

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Like Larkin’s poem, Diana Evans’s second novel suggests that absolute freedom is exhilarating but frighteningly expansive; that it is risky to lose oneself too completely in the heady pleasures that allow us to fly far above ground. The Wonder opens with an image of flight: Lucas, the young man whose journey of self-discovery frames the novel, is whisked away in a dream by a highway man and together they speed out of Ladbroke Grove and into open countryside, before Lucas wakes up disorientated in the cramped bed he shares with his sister. This opening passage reverberates throughout the novel as a pattern repeats itself across generations: a man in flight, enjoying the exhilaration of movement, is pulled back down to earth by the people, scents and sounds which are the fabric of our everyday lives.

Lucas was orphaned at a young age and in his mid-twenties begins to tentatively unravel his family history through photographs, anecdotes and other tokens of lives lived and lost, from newspaper cuttings to clothes rotting away in an old wardrobe. Out of these fragments emerges the story of a 1960s black dance troupe led by Lucas’s father, Antoney, and peopled with other creative and volatile characters, including Lucas’s mother Carla. As the troupe travels from London to Europe, we see the energy and exhilaration that comes from creative expression and success, but we also see the fallout when this excitement cannot be reconciled with personal relationships and everyday experiences.

The tension between these two facets of life is brilliantly communicated through the book’s language, which vacillates between energetic, bouncing prose that mirrors the dancers’ flies and leaps, and grounded earthy language which pulls the reader in the opposite direction. From taste to smell, the writing is thick with the intimate phenomena that make up our everyday lives and form memories of those who have left us. Descriptions of the characters within the dance troupe and the people who orbited their world are touching but unsentimental, while the book describes different periods of London’s history with an exquisite sense for detail. Just as Lucas’s own life is gradually peopled with the generations who have gone before him, so late-1990s Ladbroke Grove becomes populated with the ghosts of its past, the air filled with the sounds, smells and tastes of a developing multicultural community and the burgeoning Notting Hill Carnival.

Lucas’s research reveals a tendency among male members of his family to sacrifice all they have for the idea of freedom, including the people they love. The novel’s take on modern masculinity is remarkably nuanced and thought-provoking, the brash confidence of its male characters always undercut by a sense of sadness at the inevitability of their fate. However, the book’s themes reach beyond gender politics: it meditates on the transition we all have to make from the wonder of childhood and adolescence, when life is at its most vivid and colourful, to the rules and responsibilities of adulthood.

It is testament to Evans’s great skill as a writer that she manages to effortlessly weave these complex themes into a novel which is also a great pleasure to read. Beautifully written but never overwrought, The Wonder is brilliantly evocative of time and place and its characters are both intriguing and amiable. Furthermore, the mysteries laced through Lucas’s family history keep the pages turning until the very end.

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