This is billed as Dunmore's first ghost story, but when I finished reading it – at a stately pace, savouring sentences because they are good and you almost know the ending from the beginning – I wanted to argue with that label. Unlike them, however, Isabel is not moving on into the social and culinary experiments of the 60s but gazing back into her wartime childhood and her landlady's unresolved grief for a lost lover.
The heroine Isabel and her husband Philip don't notice Isabel's overcooked steak and kidney pudding and dense cakes, reminding me of AS Byatt's Frederica and Stephanie Potter in the same postwar Yorkshire. Dunmore's fiction has inhabited the 1940s and 50s for a decade now, and what might in less skilled hands feel like "period detail" seems natural here: the poor quality meat still rationed when the young lovers of the war have turned grey, the eking out of coal to last a Yorkshire winter.
The Greatcoat is set in the same postwar era as Helen Dunmore's last novel, The Betrayal, but swaps St Petersburg for a Yorkshire town and its abandoned airbase.
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