Charlotte, a pensioner with an active mind but an ailing body, sits at her daughter’s house and watches time pass as she recovers from a broken hip. The mugging which has snatched away her independence kicks a host of other characters into new, exciting orbits, from budding romances to career opportunities. As they deal with the daily challenges they face, Charlotte stays still and reflects on her life. People come to her; excursions to the garden gate are momentous events.

How It All Began examines the idea that one small event can set hundreds of others into motion, connecting our decisions and misfortunes with the lives of people we’ve never met. It suggests, playfully, that this concept is a nexus between constructed narratives and the apparently random events that make up our lives. Unfortunately, this idea is never quite realised to its full potential: too often the novel makes it explicit, when it should have been wound through the core of the narrative, barely appearing on its surface.

The book has other strengths, however, as a perceptive study of the choice between rebellion and grudging acceptance that we all have to make when faced with old age. Charlotte teeters between the two: although she deals with her situation with fortitude, she mourns her independence and her calm observations about those around her are laced with caustic wit, passing judgement on everything from their reading matter to the patronising way she’s often treated.

The plodding pace of the narrative can be frustrating, but it befits Charlotte’s slowness in her incapacitated state, and her contemplative nature. It also allows for delicate, insightful meditations on ageing. Eventually we are all, Charlotte realises, just a sum of our experiences, leaving behind a trail of past selves. Her previous incarnations – at 20, at 30 – are “innocents going about long forgotten business”, which ”add up to what we have today: Charlotte washed up in Ward C, learning laboriously how to walk again.” The book is forthright about the indignities suffered by pensioners, due in no small part to this contradiction between past and present selves. But it also stresses the pleasures still to be had, from books, the radio and gardening – or from one’s own company.

It’s a shame that few of the book’s other storylines are as measured or as perceptive as Charlotte’s. Her daughter Rose has the opportunity to make one final, risky grab for another life, and the relationship between the two women is the book’s most nuanced, underlining the parallels between middle and old-age, mothers and daughters. Other characters are unsympathetic and unconvincing. Henry, Rose’s employer, presents an alternative to Charlotte’s stoicism, accepting his physical and mental decline with rather less dignity. But he’s nothing more than a figure of fun, and it’s difficult to care about him or the other upper-middle-class characters, who are not intricately drawn enough even to inspire distaste. One feels that if Charlotte ever met them, she would pour measured scorn on their trivial concerns, giving the novel more of the bite it so desperately needs.

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