Maggie's Tree, by Julie Walters

Thesps on thin ice in midwinter Manhattan

It's not easy being a theatrical landlady. I speak from bitter experience. You might strike lucky and get yourself a nice little actor who stays quietly in bed all day eating toast, till it's time for curtain-up, but thesp lodgers like this, though fat round the middle, are thin on the ground. Most stub their fags out any old where, have noisy but unsatisfactory sex at odd times of day, and commit atrocities in the washbasins. And so it is with the cast of Julie Walters's first novel.

Four British entertainers squash into rented rooms in New York; Helena is going down a storm on Broadway, the other three are mainly there for the ride. Maggie, a fey creature, given to trolling around in a blue velvet cloak, gets drunk as a skunk in a New York dive, goes nuts, then goes missing in the middle of a blizzard. The rest of them make half-hearted attempts to find her, while their own relationships fall apart.

They argue, they smoke, they fight, they shout and take liberties in the sink. The married couple have rough, furniture-breaking sex and Cissie, a stand-up comedienne, is outed as a lesbian. Outside, New York City grinds to a halt as the snow piles up. The theatres close so Helena and co get little relief from one another, or us from them.

Maggie is rescued by Michael - a man poleaxed by grief from the death of his young son. Michael's grief is a solid presence through the book. The dead boy is also very real - evoked by a transient smell of sweet milk and marshmallow, and his old toys.

These passages are knockout stuff, the work of a writer who knows what she's doing. There's nothing tentative about the writing, and Walters brings her experiences as an actress to bear on the page. She's good on voices - especially the voices of minor characters - and the way people express emotions through their bodies. Reading this, you do have the sensation of entering someone else's mind and of looking through someone else's eyes.

But what, and this is a question theatrical landladies often ask, is wrong with this lot's balance? Walters's cast, even when sober, seem incapable of remaining upright. Out on the streets they prat-fall on the ice, and they fare no better indoors. They slip on lino and milk, bang their heads, kick over ashtrays, fall flat on their backs running down corridors and clutch at walls and trousered legs in futile attempts to get upright. I've never known so much falling down in one novel.

And they bleed. They sit down on forks, stab themselves with toe-nails, cut themselves with plastic whistles and bits of glass, and go for each other with their fingernails. Sometimes the book seems like one long haemorrhage, and it's the mad, blue-cloaked Maggie who supplies most of the blood. There is much mopping up to be done in these pages, but not by me. I've hung up my landlady's bucket.