England's Lane by Joseph Connolly: review Inside every fat novel there is a thin one trying desperately to get out. And so it is with England's Lane, Joseph Connolly's new novel about life in north London in 1959. Its 400-plus pages chart the tumultuous fortunes of Jim and Milly, Jonathan and Fiona, Stan and Jane, the three married couples that all own a shop on England's Lane, all have just one child (but plenty of secrets), and all of whom occupy the outer reaches of the communicative spectrum: they are either loquacious in the extreme or steadfastly mute. Which is important, for as much as anything else, England's Lane is a novel of voices. Of voices shaped by time and place and class. Voices like Jonathan's, the street's butcher and narcissistic sociopath, whose mannered verbosity is positively epigrammatic in comparison to garrulous Jim, the salt-of-the-earth ironmonger, or sweetshop owner Stan and his non-stop verbal diarrhoea. They talk, these men, on and on; to themselves, but also to budgerigars, and even, occasionally, to their wives. Not that they hear much in return. For at least two of them are the polar opposite: from Fiona we hear very little and from Jane almost nothing, for she chooses for much of the book not to speak at all. Milly, though, is different. She's a talker for sure, but she's also the heartbeat of the novel - the character that you feel for most as she tries still to help others even as her own life is spinning out of control. Unfortunately for Milly, however, she is overburdened not just with debt and guilt but also with the period detail that so often characterises contemporary fiction set in the past. Her meandering and digressive stream of consciousness is full of it, and she's not alone: brand names, food stuffs, prices, shops - the ephemera of the era is overbearing. As is the never-ending small talk, which doubtlessly characterised petit-bourgeois conversation in the Fifties but surely didn't need to be so faithfully reproduced here. There is, I suspect, a very good book lurking in these pages. The novel is not short of incident and Connolly has a keen sense of the hushed emotional tenderness of English life and our silent shattering pain, but these quiet observations are drowned out by ceaseless chatter, of which there is simply far too much. England's Lane Joseph Connolly Quercus, £18.99, 422pp