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Alice is an adventuress, a red-haired opportunist, a Becky Sharp without the wit. Her heart is set on the stage; the endless prairies of Dakota don’t augur well for such ambitions, so when Drouett abandons her there she latches onto a Lutheran missionary who at least takes her as far as Chicago, whence she soon escapes to New York.
From New York it is but a short hop to London and a new life. Alice is the mistress of re-invention, but she has a baby to cramp her style. Even though Asa is the most obliging baby ever born, never making a sound or needing a nappy change, Alice finds his presence incompatible with a stage career. She makes arrangements; without Asa, the sky’s the limit.
The second narrative concerns an English boy called Ralph Bentley; not his real name, but he knows nothing about his parentage. In childhood he is enclosed first in a crumbling Sussex mansion in the care and company of servants, then in bachelor squalor in a Norfolk cottage with a shambolic eccentric he knows as ‘uncle’. Uncle is always trying to invent things. Against the odds he succeeds, triumphantly, with the recipe for a new colour, ‘an amalgam of crimson and gentian’, which he names ‘hogpen’. The virulent brilliance of hogpen appeals to the post-Great War generation seeking relief from drab austerity. Uncle and ‘nephew’ abandon Norfolk for London, where the glamour of their new-minted wealth causes high society to overlook the older man’s gaucherie, the young man’s obscure origins. They fall within the orbit of Alice, now a rich widow and fashionable hostess, her acting days firmly behind her. The two narratives dovetail.
Taylor is good on period detail; he efficiently captures the sense of social upheaval that characterised 1920s Britain. Bright Young Things, social climbers, boom-or-bust businessmen, parade colourfully through the pages. But the central mystery is no mystery at all; only the most dull-witted reader can remain unaware of the truth of Ralph’s birth beyond the first few chapters. When Drouett the salesman re-enters the story we know that Alice’s house of cards will topple; the question is when, not if or how. The impetus to read on would be stronger if the characters were complex or engaging, but Ralph is a cipher, ‘uncle’ a caricature, and Alice a creature without an inner life.
Ask Alice would make a good television play. Taylor has provided carefully constructed sets and a convincing commentary on social change; a good director and a strong cast could breathe life into characters who on the page are too psychologically stunted to sustain our interest.
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