The Space Between, by Rachel Billington

The pain of starting out all over again

If in doubt, publishers tell you, keep doing more of the same. Because of a widespread desire to pigeonhole writers, repetition works as well with booksellers and readers. Brave is the author so versatile that you never quite know what he or she is going to do next. Brave, and probably under-appreciated: like Rachel Billington.

If in doubt, publishers tell you, keep doing more of the same. Because of a widespread desire to pigeonhole writers, repetition works as well with booksellers and readers. Brave is the author so versatile that you never quite know what he or she is going to do next. Brave, and probably under-appreciated: like Rachel Billington.

Her 16 novels since 1969 cross all demarcations. There have been sagas - the bestseller A Woman's Age and, more recently, A Woman's Life. There have been crisp, wry observations of modern manners - Loving Attitudes and All Things Nice. And tales with a strong social message like Tiger Sky, about the fate of a notorious prisoner released into an unwelcoming community. (Billington's father was the Labour peer and penal reformer, Lord Longford).

Throw in a well-executed pastiche of an 18th-century novel ( Magic and Fate) and a haunting thriller ( Bodily Harm), plus several works of non-fiction, children's books and the odd play for stage and screen, and the result is that any lasting impression of the Billington canon is one of infinite adaptability.

The Space Between is part-thriller and part study of a woman at a turning-point in her life. Alice Lightfoot is a young widow in her early forties, with grown-up children. She has been living on autopilot since the death of her husband when, out of the blue, her world begins anew.

The building blocks of her weekly routine - her job as a newspaper columnist, her visits to her aged father in a nursing home in Brighton, her trips to the opera with an old friend - collapse in a heap.

Yet while she is on the floor, not one but four men proposition her in a single week. She finds herself catapulted into a financial and political scandal that she is beyond grasping.

Her almost fatal inability, at this crucial moment, to engage what had been a finely-tuned brain leaves her marooned on the Scilly Isles, trying to escape her past, present and future.

One hallmark of a Billington book is elegant, apparently effortless plotting. The Space Between moves easily and convincingly between the generations that encase Alice's life - her rebellious daughter Florrie, her adored but only half-embraced granddaughter, Lilly, her self-centred father, and the hole left by her mother's early death. As events spin her round ever faster, Alice, who missed out on adolescence, starts to act like a dizzy teenager.

The dénouement is less important than this stripping-down and reassembling of Alice. She embarks for a second time on adult life, on this occasion with her eyes open. Billington conveys this painful transformation with aplomb, the detail acute, the prose polished and the pages turning effortlessly.

Novels about mid-life crises are all too often hackneyed and depressing. The Space Between, told with wit and insight, leaves an overall effect that is light but never lightweight.

The reviewer's latest book is 'Heaven: a traveller's guide' (HarperCollins)