Books: Lean meat

Deborah Moggach has so far proved to be a dab hand at weaving a good story around a catchy social issue (fraud, surrogate motherhood) or a fancy slice of history (seventeenth century Dutch tulip fever). This time she's taken on life in the first world war - not on the battlefields, but in civilian London, among the women, the children, the shell-shocked and the profiteers.

The blurb calls this book "darkly atmospheric". It's certainly dark, literally; Moggach deftly conveys the dim, grubby interiors and sooty streets where newly widowed Eithne Clay, her son Ralph and their servant Winnie struggle to keep a boarding house going despite wartime shortages and rising prices.

Into their precarious lives crashes Neville Turk the butcher. Besotted with Eithne's body, he woos her and her household with juicy cuts of meat, electricity, a car and a telephone - not to mention sex.

He seems to be giving her everything she wants, but Ralph isn't fooled, nor is Winnie or mysterious blind lodger Alwyne Flyte. Yet there seems to be nothing they can do to get rid of him. Meanwhile the battles and the deaths continue, and soon the casualties start appearing

If all this sounds a bit overblown, that's because the book is too. Like some of Moggach's earlier books, it would probably make a great television screenplay. And unlike Final Demand (which I found much more substantial), it has a fairly predictable ending which the producers are unlikely to want to change so drastically that they completely subvert what the author was trying to do.

I'm fascinated by the way in which some writers of historical novels can put together such a compelling read, without ever quite managing to go beyond the literary equivalent of a particular kind of fast food. It's more satisfying and probably better for you than much of what's on offer - Cobb and Co, rather than McDonald's. But no matter how attractively it's all laid out, there's always a strong whiff of bottled formulas and processed ingredients about it. Cigars are clamped between teeth; questions burn in the backs of minds; hardness enters souls.

Ralph, the confused, resentful 14-year-old whose perspective predominates, is the most multi-layered and engaging character; his love for his mother and grief for his dead father and friend is movingly muddled up with his embarrassing sexual cravings, his visceral loathing for his new stepfather and his longing to be taken seriously.

None of the others quite escape pastiche, and the less significant they are, the more stereotyped they seem. With the exception of Ralph, who could have strayed from another kind of novel altogether, there always seems to be a safely unbridgeable distance between the author and her creations. It's as if they exist only for the purpose of telling the story.

For thousands of readers, that's not going to be a problem, and In the Dark could well prove extremely popular.