You know that the Lord is our shepherd, Grace. We are just sheep. Only sheep. If we wander off the path, we need God to find us and bring us home.In the beginning of The Trouble With Goats and Sheep, we meet ten year-old Grace – a wryly precocious blend of Scout Finch and Junie B. Jones – as she processes the big news on her cul-de-sac: Mrs. Creasy of Number Eight, The Avenue has disappeared (not taking even her shoes with her), and with the summer break looming, Grace and her best friend Tilly decide to spend their holidays investigating the case. As much as I did enjoy the quirky voice of this opening, I wondered if I had accidentally picked up a YA mystery, but as the point-of-view shifts to the various adults in the neighbourhood, and as they all fear that Mrs. Creasy might have discovered the dark secrets they've been hiding for nearly a decade, the novel definitely leaps out of kid-lit territory. In the end, there was much about this book that made for an enjoyable reading experience, but along the way, there was much that annoyed me, too.
Early on, when Grace asks the local vicar what causes people to disappear, he gives the above answer about the need to find God in order to be found. When Grace and Tilly attend a funeral later that week – at which the vicar gives a sermon on Judgment Day; when all people will be separated into the sheep who will be saved and the goats who will be damned – the girls leave with a confused image of God the shepherd, but they do know one thing: if they can find God on their street, Mrs. Creasy will come home. Posing as Brownies earning merit badges, the pair drop in on each of their neighbours, ask them about God, and observe private behaviours that convince them that separating people into goats and sheep is harder than they had imagined. This might make it sound like a very religious book but it really isn't: author Joanna Cannon is simply using the goats and sheep metaphor as a framework; a metaphor which, by the end, she flogs into the ground.
This street is claustrophobic: suffering through the apparently famous British heat wave of 1976, every one of the neighbours is keeping an eye on the others, peeping through windows, and rushing out to confront one another on the sidewalk. When Thin Brian thinks he spots someone skulking about in the dark, his Mam says, “Well, if you're going to do it, do it properly. Switch the big light off and pull the curtains back.” Expert level snooping. Yet, as much as these folks are watching each other, it's the house at the top of The Avenue – where that weirdo, perhaps pervert, Walter lives – that consumes everyone's most avid attention: things have happened there that Grace and Tilly needn't learn the details of, but they do know not to go near Number Eleven. Despite giving the reader the impression that Walter might be the victim of a smear campaign, when the girls do make a trip to Walter's house – when he insists that they come inside for some lemonade – I didn't trust him either.
In Joanna Cannon's blog, we learn that she is a clinical psychiatrist who wrote this book in honour of the misfits that she meets every day in her practise:
I decided to write Goats and Sheep, because I believe there is a little unbelonging in all of us – it’s just that some people are better at hiding it than others. In the story, everyone on The Avenue has something to conceal, a reason for not fitting in. It’s only in the thick, suffocated heat of the summer, that the ability to hide these differences becomes impossible, and along with the fractured lawns and the melting tarmac, the lives of all the neighbours begin to deconstruct. Through the eyes of Grace, our ten year-old narrator, we discover that if we scratch the surface of most sheep, we might very well find ourselves with a goat. And the biggest problem of all, is trying to work out the difference.And the storyline is just that deliberate: each neighbour has a reason for their flawed behaviour – oh, that's why you're a drunk, and that's why you're a middle-aged man still living with your Mam – and it would seem that Mrs. Creasy was a saintly soul who had gone out amongst her neighbours, learned their secrets, and tried to help them. And these neighbours – the apparent good sheep – are so afraid that she had learned their biggest, darkest, collective secret (which is really pretty awful), that when she went missing, they all hope that she's been murdered and thrown into a canal somewhere instead of gone off to weigh her moral obligations. There's nothing at all subtle about this goats and sheep business; these aren't normal people at all.
There is a lot of very quirky humour in this book, and the conversations between Grace and Tilly often made me smile, even as I recognised and cringed at the unequal power balance of the relationship – but all little girls probably had that one friend they liked to push around a little bit; it felt completely truthful. I was charmed by the period nods I recognised from a 1970s childhood, but being non-Brit, I was clueless about radio presenters, the hundred different brands of cookies mentioned; don't know what Babycham or a Whimsy bushbaby is (but, obviously, Cannon doesn't need to write only references I would get). Grace is always making deep observations, like “Sometimes, with grown-ups, the gaps between your question and their answer is too big, and it always seems like the best place to put all your worrying into.” Some of that is okay, but by the end, I grew weary of the wisdom-of-children shtick. And there was something very deliberate in the pacing of the plot; something soap opera-ish about the mini-disaster of Tilly's brush with death that gets resolved before the true climax.
In the end, I think that this was an excellent effort at writing a novel for a clinical psychiatrist working in NHS parking lots, but weighed against seasoned novelists, it's a rather amateurish effort. I do admit that there were many, many lovely lines – there was much that I enjoyed, for sure – and if you don't mind an overworked metaphorical framework and a book peopled by ultimately unlikeable charicatures, you just might enjoy some of this, too.
