Nothing connects

This is a slight book containing short stories about minor characters. And it is about to receive some fairly faint praise. A Possible Life, Sebastian Faulks’ 12th novel, does little to confirm exactly where he sits in the modern British canon. It probably does not matter greatly; on this showing, he is a competent creator of unmemorable prose, but there is little more to conclude than that.

His resolutely low-key approach is certainly deliberate. A Possible Life tells five separate life stories of individuals (two from the 19th century, two from the 20th, and one from the 21st), who struggle in their attempts to establish a meaningful existence.

There is Geoffrey, a rural schoolteacher sent to France as a spy during the second world war, who escapes from a concentration camp and seems doomed to a life of mental decrepitude. Billy is a Victorian workhouse boy made good, who ends the century with two wives in a railwayman’s cottage in Clapham. We also have the futuristic Elena, who discovers the anatomical location of human consciousness, and Jeanne, a simple-minded nanny in rural France who lives her life on a ‘low flame’. Finally, there is the story of Anya, a 1970s folk singer, with whom the moony narrator — an English rock star of sorts — is in love, and whose semi-successful album career is charted with breathless precision.

By my reckoning Faulks covers over 200 years of lived existence in a book of 300 pages. So while it may be laudable — contra Thomas Carlyle — to tell history through the biographies not of great men but of often mediocre entities, the pace of the narration means that Faulks has written no single character worthy of our prolonged attention.

Certainly, the overarching connection between the stories fails to convince.