Rachel Dawson
John Murray Press, 25 May 2023
Available as: HB, 304pp, audio, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 1399801929
I'm grateful to John Murray Press for an advance e-copy of Neon Roses via Netgalley to consider for review.
Rachel Dawson's novel is an absorbing and eventually uplifting story of some very hard times. It's a book that acknowledges dark things, but refuses to despair, a story that showcases the need for solidarity, for friendship and always, for finding hope and a way forward.
It's 1984 and in the Valleys of South Wales a young woman, Eluned, is committed to supporting the miners' strike. In this she and her community are lined up against the cruel Thatcher government and its supporters in the media and the police (the latter personified by the unpleasant Graham, boyfriend of Eluned's little sister, Mabli). It was a very polarising time which as a teenager (not in a mining area) I remember well, I saved up pocket money to donate and I still have my Coal Not dole stickers in my scrapbook.
As the only person in her family with a wage (she works as an assistant in a show shop) Eluned plays a key role, although it is a precarious one (who has money for shoes during the strike?) and as the months roll on, we see things tighten for the miners, with the eventual end of the strike and, in prospect, the end of the coal industry and of whole communities like Eluned's. But a time of change is also a time of opportunities and new horizons, and the solidarity of the strike has introduced Eluned to members of LGSM - Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners - who have been fundraising and organising. In turn, that leads her to explore her own sexuality, and when she sees her way to a department store job away from home in Cardiff, to form new relationships.
I was struck by the portrayal of Eluned. Dawson avoids cliche - Eluned isn't a naive young girl astonished to learn the ways of the world, so much as a smart and curious person discovering who she is and what she wants. Resourceful and compassionate, there is a real warmth to the character, with her love of music, her kindness to her landlady in Cardiff (a fascinating woman who surely deserves a novel of her own) and above all, her desire to experience the world - which makes her the reader's eyes and ears in Dawson's depiction of LGBQT culture in 1980s Cardiff and in London (and, eventually, Manchester). That depiction is done with a great sense of vibrancy, not dwelling on the darker things - Section 28, AIDS/ HIV - although they are acknowledged, with the notorious James Anderton, head of the Greater Manchester police, playing a role - but stressing the power of resistance and the potential of human connection.
I always hesitate to use "coming of age novel" as a description of a book, because it seems to stick a huge label on a process that properly is nuanced and drawn out, but I'll mutter it here in passing - and then hurry on to stress that this is a very subtle, very nuanced book. Yes, at times Eluned gets in over her head - both for good and bad: at one stage she takes up with a woman who is controlling and manipulative - but she soon gets out of that and it's beautiful watching her relationship with June quicken and deepen.
The book captures the 80s atmosphere well, I think, both through incidental things - like the copious smoking, the sisters sharing a Walkman, the music - and the fact that Eluned is fairly easily able to get that shop job - retail hadn't been gutted by online sales). The only detail I could spot that didn't quite work was the reference to a videographer at a wedding in 1973. It's good on atmosphere, evoking both the Valleys towns and June's London squat with its raucous, supportive sisterhood, and it doesn't try to tie everything up, leaving things on a note of hope and mutual support but definitely unresolved.
This is one I'd recommend strongly. And finally, no this is not "Pride - The Novel" - it goes deeper that that - though if you have seen that film there will inevitably be some crossover events and themes.
For more information about Neon Roses, see the publisher's website here.
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