The prose in Tom Newlands’ debut novel is wonderful, managing the feat of being each muscular and ethereal on the similar time. However it’s at the start the panorama that he stakes out that grabs you by the throat. Solely Right here, Solely Now is about amid the “rubbly floor”, “brambles and bins”, discarded syringes and “stamped on cans” of the fictional Muircross, a gritty, grotty post-industrial city on Scotland’s Firth of Forth. The 12 months is 1994 and the temper in Muircross is hopeless: the pits have closed, and nothing has moved in to interchange them. For 14-year-old Cora, although, the outlook is considerably completely different. She has no love for the city she’s lived her life in – so far as she will be able to see, it’s “a manky wee hellhole sat out by itself on a lump of coast the form of a rooster nugget, surrounded by pylons and full of moonhowlers and outdated people and seagulls the dimensions of ironing boards that shat over all the pieces”. However she’s removed from hopeless; she’s stuffed with desires. She desires school, and Glasgow, and a flat of her personal. She desires a life that’s going someplace. She desires out.
Cora’s drive is available in half from the restlessness and rise up that possess most youngsters, even when it’s the case that “spherical right here, you lived in your city, and you then died in your city”. However Cora, we uncover, isn’t like most youngsters; not precisely. She will be able to’t sit nonetheless; her ideas fizz and skitter, and “bounce 10 chapters forward at 1,000,000 miles an hour”. She’s seen the college nurse and been despatched residence with print-outs; the phrase “hyper” has been bandied about. However in 1994, in a city like Muircross, ADHD isn’t a part of anybody’s vocabulary – and Cora herself has different issues to fret about. She and her mam are on the listing for a home in close by Abbotscraig; her mam makes use of a wheelchair and this home has a ramp. However the imaginative and prescient of a brighter, simpler future recedes when her mam produces a brand new boyfriend, who abruptly strikes in with them. Gunner – one-eyed, “head like a conker” – is an ambiguous presence in Cora’s life: taking her on lengthy walks and instructing her birds’ names on the one hand, stashing stolen items beneath her mattress on the opposite. Cora retains a watchful distance till a sequence of surprising occasions pressure the 2 of them into a clumsy alliance.
From right here, the novel tracks 4 tumultuous years: it’s a late-90s coming-of-age story through which Cora’s evolution from dreamy, myopic teen to shrewd,self-reliant younger lady unfolds towards a backdrop of cellphone containers, scrambler bikes and fast-food shops; Area Raiders, Kickers and Diamond White. Whereas her journey is small by way of distance travelled – the motion edges from Muircross, to Abbotscraig, to the West Finish of Glasgow – Cora’s metaphysical progress is firmly in Bildungsroman territory: alongside the way in which, she shucks off the constraints of household, negotiates the complexities of friendship, learns after a style to assist herself, tries her hand at love. She navigates a path across the form of monsters that flourish in small, impoverished cities and picks her well past the hazards (drink, teen being pregnant, onerous medication) that lurk in them, too. She figures out, slowly, whom she will be able to, and may’t, belief. And regardless of all these pressing exterior challenges, she works her means by way of her inside struggles, too: coming to phrases with the trauma and tragedy of her previous, and with the reality about herself and her sophisticated, animated, effervescent mind.
It’s the method through which Newlands expresses this effervescence that makes Solely Right here, Solely Now so uncommon and so transferring – and in the end, if my expertise is something to go by, so memorable. Cora’s neurodivergence is vividly, uniquely current within the language Newlands offers to her. It emerges from the pages within the evocative eccentricity of her metaphors and similes (“her fragrance smelled of lawnmowing”; “his voice got here out of [the phone] all loopy and crackly like a wee digital speaking prawn”), and within the glitter and shimmer she perceives on the planet round her. By having Cora deploy the shabby objects and meagre accoutrements of her life in surprising, revivifying context, Newlands casts a new gentle each on the expertise of dwelling with ADHD, and on the humdrum, down-at-heel world through which Cora resides.
In direction of the top of the novel, Cora finds herself on a Muircross rooftop, ingesting wine from a bottle with an outdated buddy, as police automobiles race by. “We sat there in silence watching the blue gentle bleeding by way of the timber like we had been ready for an indication,” she says. “To be rained on, to be caught, to be cut up aside by lightning. To be given the reply to one thing, from someplace.” In Solely Right here, Solely Now indicators are few and far between, and solutions onerous to come back by. However in displaying us the world by way of Cora’s eyes, Newlands presents us, as an alternative, each magnificence and hope.
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