You by Joanna Briscoe - review

You
by Joanna Briscoe
(Bloomsbury, £11.99)

What I love most about Joanna Briscoe's writing is that she vividly evokes a sense of place. In the bestselling Sleep With Me, it was modern London.

In her new novel, You, it's Dartmoor and a leaky, cold, labyrinthine and probably haunted house. Briscoe grew up on Dartmoor, and it shows (I live on nearby Exmoor, which is not as bleak or tor-strewn, but the bogs and the mists and the loneliness sound the same). There are wild ponies, their manes like bunting in the wind. And dreadful hippies, graduates of stained-glass-making school, who make leaky pottery mugs, the women in awful long skirts who recoil from refined flour but never pay their taxes. Sheep are everywhere, on the moor and in this book: they clump indignantly on verges. Women seem to go a bit mad in these bleak settings; look at Cathy, or me. And Briscoe's new heroine, the flame-haired Cecilia, is no exception.

This novel has a fantastic plot, involving an adolescent crush the 17-year-old Cecilia has on her bookish, thirtysomething teacher, and a parallel lesbian affair, but it's the writing that's astounding. I've never come across teenage love, a wash of emotion and longing that can never be equalled in its intensity, written about so romantically but also so gynaecologically. The stupid straws adolescent girls clutch at are strewn across this book, like Pick Up Sticks. The teacher is called James, and so Celie reads Casino Royale, just so she can see his name in print. How girls will garner a detail about their beloved, and examine it and elaborate on it and gnaw on it for months, years!

Adolescent girls can fall in love without any reason or encouragement. I had a similar but sadly unconsummated crush on my teacher, Charles-the-law-lecturer, based on the fact he had blond hair like Paul Nicholas and drove a cream Beetle. That was it! But I spent two years catching early buses, or late buses, on the off-chance of a glimpse.

Celie and her friends discuss the sightings of James. "Some of us have already seen him today.

He's wearing a greenish jacket, tweedy stuff ...

His hair's going to be cut soon." Boys don't do this, I'm sure. They are too busy eating, or scratching.

This novel shows how powerful teenage girls are, how dangerous, and how so often their brilliance is snuffed out by men who never quite measure up to that first great love. I was slightly wary when Cecilia's teenage daughters entered the book, but Briscoe manages to capture the way they speak and feel: they are so free and confident and different from the way she was, that I warmed to them. It was refreshing, too, to have an elderly mother portrayed not as a dried-up old husk but as someone who still has urges. My only gripe was the ending. I'd have liked things sewn up a little more tightly. But I'm jealous of anyone who hasn't read this book. What a treat you have in store.