The H-Bomb Girl

The Liverpool of the emerging Beatles and the Cuban Missile Crisis and the even more fascinating and spooky mystery of why 14-year-old Laura seems to be a younger version of one of her teachers, the mother of a waitress at a basement club, and the object of their and others’ interest. The story is slow to get under way and often distracted by presenting the factual accuracy of Liverpool and the Beatles and winding up the plot. The sci fi playing with time is the mainspring: the scene where the 1962 youngsters discover a mobile, laptop and credit cards offers wonderful possibilities but, like much of the possibly fascinating detail, it remains inert. More successful is the offering of alternative outcomes to the Crisis which gives us a devastating post nuclear world nuclear exchange (a reminder of books from an earlier generation). The characters, including Laura’s friends, are often stereotypes: the black and polio afflicted Joel, the poor but tough Bernadette and the gay musician Nick. But in the holocaust their fates and suffering are more powerfully felt and this casts a strong shadow over what is a more conventional ending.