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Graham Joyce, The Year of the Ladybird: A Ghost Story (Gollancz, 2013, 266pp, £12.99)
Reviewed by Andrew Hedgecock
I have vivid memories of the endless, searing summer of 1976: reading Michael Moorcock's The Final Programme on a deckchair in the garden, playing Steve Miller's Fly Like an Eagle full blast until the neighbours banged on the wall, buying my first underage pint of bitter (25p) in the Magdalen in Doncaster marketplace and failing my maths O Level. I have no memory at all of the plague of ladybirds from which Graham Joyce's novel takes its title, but he renders everything else about those five months in such vivid detail I have no doubt whatsoever about his powers of recall.
Even if The Year of the Ladybird was merely a sharp and vibrant nostalgia trip it would be well worth reading, simply for the peerless clarity and conversational wit of the narrator's reminiscences. But there's more to the story than that: it is an affecting collision of the meticulously mimetic and the miraculous. It is also a rigorous inquest into the cultural and political dark side of a decade that had a formative impact on the way we live now.
By the mid-1970s the nascent and fragile spirit of the late 1960s, based on creativity, generosity and optimism, had been replaced by anxiety, suspicion and a bogus sense of historical identity. There had been pub bombings on the British mainland, the National Front was at the height of its influence and there were, even at the time, rumours of a planned military...