Review: 26a by Diana Evans - E. Sankore

26a, Diana Evans’ lyrical, enchanting first novel, tells the coming-of-age story of Bessi and Georgia, identical twins growing up in the North London suburb of Neasden and the story of their mixed race family – the mother, an Edo girl who runs away from home at 15 to escape an arranged marriage, the father, a Derbyshire accountant who runs to Lagos to escape an alienating childhood, an elder and younger sister.

The rich, fantastical tone of the novel is drawn from the twins’ exploration of individuality and identity and their efforts to make sense of themselves in the world. Twins- sacred, mystical beings in Nigerian myth and folklore- are revered and reviled, their birth raising questions about the nature of existence, identity and personhood. Evans taps into this rich cultural vein to provide her story with its haunting, magic-evoking rhythm. Bessi and Georgia understand the look in the eyes of their pet hamster when “feebly he poked at the plastic wheel in the corner, looking for motion, hoping for escape or clarity. And the explanations never came. It was deeper than needing to know what the wheel was for, where the cage had come from and how he’d got there, or in the twins’ case, the meaning of ‘expialidocious’ or why their father liked Val Doonican. It was more of a What is Val Doonican? And therefore, What am I? The question that preceded all others.”

In their loft bedroom – the “26a” Waifer Avenue of the title- the twins engage in their unique communion of “decision” making, “deciding” if their parents should get divorced, if they should become all Nigerian, making sense of the world beyond their joined/separate beings.

However, it was when the family moves to Nigeria, away from the apples, snow and Woolworths of Neasden that the twins start to draw into their separate selves. Georgia traumatized by her father’s cockroach-wrangling gateman in Nigeria keeps the experience from her twin, instinctively protecting her from the dark. “Bessi” Georgia says “is where bad things never happen.”

Back in Neasden, the twins grow into young adults in the same loft room on Waifer Avenue, apparently within the same external world but each now treading perceptibly different paths. It is North London in the 70s and 80s, a world of Michael Jackson concerts, electric blue fishtail skirts, Roy Ayers albums and leering Jamaican boys, lusting after their yellow skin. The twins move separately through this world, Bessi walking in light, Georgia clinging to the shadows.

The novel’s third and last bit is so keenly observed, so nuanced in detail, that it is not surprising to discover that the author was born a twin. Death reaches back into the twins’ lives for Georgia. “Georgia, who was born first, forty five minutes first, refused to breathe for seven minutes. And two and a half years later, still resentful she was rushed back to St. Luke’s Hospital….”

Nigerian myth and folklore provides a view of the world - a world shifting on itself, taking and losing form - that makes the novel work. It is therefore disappointing that in an otherwise finely observed and nuanced novel, Nigeria is sometimes tentatively drawn, without the sure hand and detail that enlivens the novel’s London.

But this is a minor quibble, 26a is a beautiful, wonderful book.