Dangerous romance – Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley

‘The bus company’s yellow tin sign on its concrete post seemed for a long while a forlorn flag announcing nothing,’ notes Stella, the narrator of Tessa Hadley’s new novel Clever Girl. Stella moves from childhood in 1950s Bristol through a series of episodes to end up married and financially secure. However, a ‘flag announcing nothing’ might describe some of these discrete episodes, which sometimes fail to contribute to the larger narrative of Stella’s life. It’s as if the book is a study in the misunderstanding of consequence, where this misunderstanding is played out at a formal level. An early encounter between a child and a seemingly dangerous man appears to play no part in Stella’s psychological development. There are two murders, but only one of these really makes any mark on her. When the man who is probably her father becomes her driving instructor, he drives off again without her saying a word.