Double trouble and twin peaks

Diana Evans

Chatto & Windus, 21.99

BOOK marketeers crave bestseller comparisons so Chatto’s publicists must have rubbed their hands in glee when handed the file on Diana Evans. She is of mixed-race and 26a tells the story of English/Nigerian identical twins, growing up in London during the 1980s and 1990s.

The Zadie Smith and Monica Ali references are duly brandished and Evans is anointed as "the new literary voice of multicultural Britain". Much is made of the novel’s autobiographical derivation, specifically Evans’s experience of losing her own twin sister to suicide at 26 - which, apart from anything else, demolishes a central source of narrative tension, after one of the paired protagonists is afflicted with depression.

While the book is plugged primarily as an account of "the multicultural experience", Evans has more accurately described 26a as being "about death... about childhood and family relationships, about weird twins in summer dresses, about ghosts and the power of myth."

The facts and implications of Georgia and Bessi’s origins - Nigerian mother, father from Derbyshire; born and raised in outer-London Neasden - are fundamental in determining how these themes are realised and expressed. Happenstance, though, plays an equal role in shaping the twins’ experiences, be it their father’s propensity for violent drunken rages or the economic, social and sartorial backdrop of Thatcher’s Britain.

The novel’s central emphasis is on being and having an identical twin, as Evans successfully conveys the nature of that unique and mysterious bond. As the third-person narrative voice shifts fluidly between all members of Georgia and Bessi’s family, the matter-of-factness with which the twins’ sense of "oneness in twoness" is addressed, by themselves and others, affirms the authenticity with which it’s rendered.

This is adroitly offset by Evans’s magic-realist approach - shared dreams, telepathy and premonitions - which is where the twins theme dovetails most satisfyingly with Evans’s exploration of their African heritage.

Georgia’s descent into mental illness is portrayed with a frightening, dislocated vividness that enriches this well crafted novel. Ultimately it depicts people’s robust capacity for adaptation and survival.