Personality. Andrew O'Hagan. Faber and Faber. UK £16.99 HB

reviewed by Pat Boran

A novel which begins with a dead body washed up on a Scottish island in 1940, before leaping ahead 33 years to the Queen's Silver Jubilee, is a novel interested in the long-term nature of cause and effect.

But while the dead man is straightaway identified as a small-time Italian tenor named Colangelo, the narrative's reluctance, for the greater part of the book, to answer the question of how exactly he came to be there is itself significant. This is, after all, a small island community.

In the here and now, however, the real story of this extraordinary book is that of the thirteen year-old possessor of the finest voice on the Isle of Bute. Personality follows her move from "unknown" daughter of an Italian chip shop owner to international "child star", thanks to that prototype of EuroStar and similar fodder, Hughie Green's Opportunity Knocks.

Maria Tambini has been reared by her abandoned mother Rosa who, like her own mother also living on the island, approaches cleaning "as if it were an act of violence". Her determination and anger may have more than one cause. Among the many newspaper clippings she holds on to is, perhaps tellingly, a report of an inter-schools Highland Dancing Competition in which the then-teenage Rosa took top honours.

That young Maria's best friend Kalpana is the daughter of the local Indian doctor may say something about how belonging really works in a small community, hinting, for instance, that those perceived as outsiders may be drawn to each other; equally it may simply be a reminder that racial diversity is not, and was not, even in wider Britain of the late 1970s, confined to urban life. One of the many strengths of O'Hagan's writing is the way in which he can raise big issues and not rush in to offer glib explanations.

In a novel told through a combination of third-person narrative, shifting internal monologues, and correspondence, O'Hagan shows how the rising star discovers the attractions and excitements of fame, even as the child in her struggles to take it all in.

A particularly disturbing moment comes in one short letter from London to her friend back home. Describing one of her first "public appearances", in a Woolworths store where "they were all screaming and they had posters up and I mimed along to the record", Maria boasts: "They didn't bother if you took anything you wanted from the pick and mix." Suddenly you remember this is a thirteen-year-old girl talking. To her, fame still means free sweets.

"Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington," was Noel Coward's famous warning, and by the time the reader reaches the chapter entitled Nutrition, which commences with "Pink coconut snowballs...", it's clear that where immaturity, weight consciousness and "the business that is show" overlap, it's often good advice.

The "child star" Lena Zavaroni, on whom Maria is clearly and, it must be said, very closely based, had a particularly awful time and tragic end, though it hasn't deterred many of the would-be's who have tried to duplicate her early and rapid success. And this is a story worth telling.

But what most impresses about this thoughtful and compelling book is the way in which O'Hagan draws historical and narrative parallels, without ever fussing over them.

Back in 1940, where this novel begins after all, many Italians found themselves interned on the Isle of Bute. Others, fearing the same treatment, even took out ads in the local papers asserting that they, or members of their families, were in fact British Subjects.

In an irony that cannot be accidental in a novel so concerned with fame, it might well have been their only ever mention in a newspaper.

© copyright Pat Boran