With The Positively Last Performance, the versatile and multi-award winning Geraldine McCaughrean has created an ensemble piece in more ways than one.
The story opens in a derelict and mouldering theatre. Like the English seaside town where it stands, it has seen better days. Enter a couple determined to resurrect the scarlet and gold edifice that once rang to the resonant tones of Ellen Terry. As a town councillor observes: "Seashaw needs the Arts. The Arts are the key. You've got to have the Arts, or where are you?" Gracie, the couple's daughter, notices something that is lost on the grownups:
"'Of course I can see you!' said Gracie, beaming. The ghosts were aghast. They turned to each other, bewildered, panicky [] 'Is she a new one?' 'Is she one of us?'"
Perching on red plush seats and hanging from the opera boxes is a cast of characters who, with Gracie, will attempt to rescue the theatre, and help her confront a problem she'd rather avoid. The ghostly "Residents" have two things in common: the town of Seashaw, and the fact that none of them is alive.
McCaughrean is a stylist. Her prose is a pleasure to read, and reads as if it was a pleasure to write. There's a lightness about it, a whimsical humour, and a singular relish for language. Gracie, for instance, interrogates the ghosts about their past lives with "the ruthlessness of a thrush thrashing a snail against a rock". Later, she visits seaside arcades where "shining stacks of pennies moved like glaciers towards the brink until, in reaching the rim, they loosed noisy cataracts of plashing cash into troughs".
Each ghost has a story to tell that reveals a particular aspect of the town's history. There's a librarian swept away by Kent's worst tidal surge; a Mod slain by Rockers; a painter (a certain Mr Turner) who is in love with Seashaw's sunsets; a delightful troupe of spectral donkeys who are a law unto themselves.
The opening of the novel has a picaresque feel. The chapters devoted to successive ghosts are episodic connected, although not necessarily driving forward the story of an ailing theatre announced at the start. McCaughrean's talent for invention and her ear for dialogue means that all these character sketches are lively and entertaining. There was a moment when I questioned the amount of narrative time devoted to backstories and to a convincing history of Seashaw (the mechanical elephant, the shell grotto, the cricket ground where Fred Trueman played, the spanking new art gallery displaying pictures that "shook up [Turner's] every thought about Art and what it could be").
Then, midway, there's a brilliant plot swerve, the narrative shifts up a gear and the story rattles along towards an exciting and affecting denouement that children will love.
The afterword is revelatory. It was the artistic director of Margate's Theatre Royal who suggested McCaughrean write a book "in praise of the town, past and present, created with the help of the local people". Suddenly, the conceit of bringing together a town's past, present and future in a haunted theatre makes complete sense. And what a fantastic and inspiring idea to unite a community and a children's author in this way. The Margations must be thrilled with this charming and skilful story, woven together from their fact and McCaughrean's fiction. Every town deserves to have its own story told: let's hope the idea catches on.
Linda Buckley-Archer's Time Quake Trilogy is published by Simon & Schuster.
