Early One Morning by Virginia Baily review – fearless, witty and full of flair

Expectation can cast a long shadow over a writer’s confidence, which is why second novels have a reputation for being born out of angst and vulnerability, no matter how the first book was received. Early One Morning is Virginia Baily’s second novel, and yet if she was angst-ridden when writing it, that doesn’t show. It is incredibly sure-footed, a big, generous and absorbing piece of storytelling, fearless, witty and full of flair.

If you, like me, find yourself wary at the prospect of another novel set during either world war, be assured that there is something highly original about Baily’s approach. Daniele Levi is a boy of about seven, living in Rome’s Jewish quarter; it’s 1944, and the German occupying forces raid the area and round up its inhabitants. We see Daniele and his family on a truck, his mother in a “going-away outfit”, as if she had planned an escape there wasn’t time for. In her panic, and intuiting what awaits, Daniele’s mother hands her son over to an onlooker, a young woman. This is our protagonist and chief narrator, Chiara Ravello. What follows is the story of how Chiara and Daniele’s two lives, brutally flung together, play out.

The novel sticks with certain tropes, and some of the scenes, involving the tyranny of the Nazi occupation and its insistent abuse of power, are so familiar as to seem worn by overuse. But this is not a work of set pieces. The fate of Daniele’s family and the facts of the Holocaust occupy a subtle place in the background, a raw and terrible reality that the novel sees and feels its way into.

The book works because it gives itself fully to its characters and their relationships, from which its ample plot spirals outwards with a confidently handled complexity and depth. It has a strong centre of gravity – at its core is a love story between Chiara and Daniele. There comes a moment when Chiara realises that she loves this damaged and difficult boy – a “child of staggering perfection” – more than she loves anything or anyone else. This love is palpable; it seems to be the ink with which the novel is written.

The story of Chiara’s “rescue” of Daniele is framed by a second narrative, some 30 years later. We are in Rome in the 1970s; Chiara is living alone in half a flat (the other half has been partitioned and sold off to settle debts). She is without her sister Cecilia, and estranged from Daniele. We don’t know why, and she is resigned to living with both losses in a tormented allegiance to the status quo – not wanting to think about what she has lost, or of her culpability or complicity in what has turned out to be Cecilia’s tragic life and Daniele’s troubled one.

The catalyst for change is Maria, a 15-year-old girl from Wales who claims to be Daniele’s daughter. With Maria, one of the novel’s main motifs comes into view – that of identity. Who are we? Who do we belong to? What happens when the things that define us change or collapse? Familiar territory for the novel, perhaps, but here it is handled with such mastery – of language as well as of human psychology – that the prose never approaches cliche or tired truism.

Granted, I did have a couple of misgivings – for example, the book gives us no information on a large portion of Chiara’s life and so leaves us with unanswered questions about why it is the way it is. And towards the end the prose seems jumpy and slightly hurried, noticeable in a novel that otherwise has perfect rhythm and pitch. Yet, at its best, the writing is easy, agile and reminded me of Tessa Hadley, another masterful storyteller. Both writers do a difficult and therefore rare thing: they write apparently simple stories, clearly told, swiftly paced, yet with depth and a frank, bold beauty.

“Invisibility creeps up on you,” Chiara says. There is “a fading … a creeping pointlessness.” Fading, disappearance and loss are key themes – but there is nothing whimsical or melancholic here, even if we are acutely aware of the absence of Daniele’s mother. It’s a surprisingly humorous novel, in which the characters are tenderly mocked or mock themselves. It’s also defiant. Even as it forces its characters to lose so much, it asserts itself against those losses with vehemence and hope.