Mave Fellowes's debut effort is a literary tour de force that combines the heavy themes of grief, abandonment and friendship into an engrossing coming-of-age story that moves with the cinematic resonance and grace of the greatest silent films. Fellowes's protagonist is the recently orphaned, 18-year-old Odeline Milk, who has just moved to London in the "baggy pinstripe suit of the 1920s banker, leather brogues and bowler hat" to pursue her dream of becoming a mime. Armed with an inheritance, an A-to-Z guide to the city, and the few possessions left to her by her deceased mother, the stuck-up and antisocial Odeline takes refuge aboard an aging narrowboat called the Chaplin & Company, surviving on cheese and crackers as she struggles to practice her artistry. She is eager to connect with her absentee father, the circus clown Odelin, whom she idolizes and on whom she pins her future hopes.
Along the way, Odeline meets a motley crew of characters whose own fortunes and pain mirror the dreariness and snail-like pace of canal life: Vera, a political exile, refugee and barge café waitress, who seeks companionship despite its dangers; John Kettle, the chauvinistic and drunken canal warden, who is looking to atone for past wrongs; and the tattooed and musically gifted Ridley, who is Odeline's levelheaded neighbor and secret crush. Sharing Odeline's slapstick passage into adulthood is the boat itself, an almost living and breathing embodiment of its past owners' desires.
Fellowes uses Odeline's wide-eyed innocence and sheltered ignorance as the comic foil for the novel's more tragic figures, yet even as the words and scenes play out, she wastes no emotion. Chaplin & Company moves like the reel of everyday life, and Fellowes's true gift is in showing how the smallest experience can bring about life-changing transformations. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant