The migrant's masks

A journey of a writer who dwells both on the surface and in the deep

Linda Grant has had a meteoric rise as a novelist. Her first two novels deservedly won prizes and critical acclaim, and now she is at the height of her powers. One reason for her success is that she is able to give apparently trivial experiences the weight of history. The Cast Iron Shore brought together McCarthyite America and a love of shopping, as well as Stalinist Russia and endless self-reinvention, in a compelling combination. When I Lived in Modern Times similarly juxtaposed post-war Tel Aviv with the transformative power of hairdressing. Her play with depths and surfaces clearly resonates with the spirit of the age. She is preoccupied with the history of emigration which goes both to the heart of the 20th century, and is also something entirely intimate.

Her novels are concerned with migrant figures who are both victims of historical suffering – Jews in Europe, blacks in America, Palestinians in Israel – and are also self-transformers. After all, when migrants remake themselves, they might just need to change their name or hair-colour.

Still Here is more narrowly conceived although it does go back to the "cast iron" Liverpool of her debut novel. Grant likes writing about port cities, towns with "everyone in transit". Her novel concerns the arrival in Liverpool of the Chicago-based architect Joseph Shields, who wants to help restore the city to its former greatness. He is assisted in his task by the strong-minded Alix Rebick, a cross between an Israeli "girl soldier" and a fortysomething Bridget Jones.

Alix is part of a long established Liverpool-Jewish family whose mother, Lotte, is dying of a degenerative disease. Grant has addressed this subject before in her outstanding memoir, Remind Me Who I Am, Again. In this book she speaks movingly of the "detritus" of her mother's life which "doesn't have the capacity to tell anyone what it is any more". Not unlike the memoir, Still Here is designed to restore this maternal history to a wider context. As Alix's brother Sam observes, nine million immigrants have passed through Liverpool on the way to the US. In this sense the Mersey becomes an imaginative "lifeline to those other worlds".

The novel is divided between Alix's and Joseph's experiences, with each chapter told from their differing perspectives. We learn of Alix's early career as a "hot academic babe", her desire for "tough" men ranging from Isambard Kingdom Brunel to Ariel Sharon (in her weirder moments). She is said to "think like a man", wishes to "take up as much space as I could in the world", and describes herself as "headstrong, self-willed, narcissistic". Joseph conforms exactly to her masculine ideal and is, conveniently, coming to the end of his marriage. His wife turns out to be a "serial Pygmalion" whose final mutation reminds him of his traumatic time in the Israeli army during the Yom Kippur war.

All of Grant's main subjects – Englishness, Jewishness and post-war womanhood – have a telling duality. They can be both profound and superficial. This is epitomised by the face-cream factory which Lotte and her parents were forced to leave behind in Dresden. The destruction of Dresden and the wonders of face cream is a typical Grant juxtaposition. Her plot-line is a Mills & Boon romance filled with endless echoes from the past.

Still Here promises more than it delivers. Joseph is merely building an "art hotel", and there is much about Alix's character that fails to convince. Having said that, the focus on the on/off love affair between the two main characters does pack an emotional punch. Grant's efficient prose is always readable, but much is lost by reducing the range of her concerns to two such singular voices.

Bryan Cheyette's study of Muriel Spark is published by Northcote Press.

Still Here

Linda Grant

Little, Brown

£16.99 hardback; £10.99 paperback