This Can Never Not Be Real

Not much happens in Amberside. Every year, the Ambereve Festival features the same local musicians, with ageing rock star Eric Stone headlining, a torchlight procession and a bonfire in the grounds of historic Hearne House. There’s spicey cider to be drunk and you might as well go since everyone does and it’s not as if there’s anything else to do. Most of the older students from Clifton Academy and Sefton College are there, including our four narrators; Ellie, Joe, Violet and Peaches. They know each other by sight, the way you do in large schools; you get an impression of someone from hearsay and glimpses of guarded surfaces – like those you’ve probably cultivated for yourself.
As Ambereve draws towards the fireworks finale, Hearne House and its park suddenly explode into a bloodied killing field as terrorist gunmen launch a co-ordinated assault on the crowd. No distinctions of age, race or gender; death is random. The narrators’ accounts of their movements, thoughts and words are detailed yet fragmentary, as they find and lose one another, hunting for safe havens in the dark of the house, the gardens and even the fast flowing autumnal river. Milano’s not interested in the identity or motivation of the murderers so much as the responses of ‘ordinary people’ to sustained terror. The gunmen remain anonymous; we know only that they are not Islamic. When we meet a fifth narrator, March – Majid El Kaissi – a recent Muslim arrival in the area with his hospital doctor parents from peaceful Morocco, his perspective is: ‘I’m not glad the terrorists weren’t of my religion. I think it’s a shame they were of my species.’
From the beginning, we know that the narrators survive the killing, since the novel tells us their words are from ‘testimonies’ given to an Inquest. In truth, the language of the testimonies is informal, exploratory even, never suggesting constrained replies to searching questions. These are highly articulate, literate teenagers, all of them self-aware and increasingly sensitive in their reactions to each other during the attack. Often, their accounts reflect the panicked confusion; a couple of lines from one narrator might be developed by another’s view of the same incident, maybe through a snatch of recalled dialogue. Milano does not offer a coherent description of the attack; we never learn, for example, how it was finally suppressed by the police.
We come to know the narrators through their own words, since no authorial voice introduces them to readers or intrudes with background or comment. We realise that each is self-conscious about areas of their own lives and yet, despite the danger, they all find the strength to reach out to others. Peaches, embarrassed by her shape and weight, loathes her own body. The evening’s terror brings her close to Joe, who in turn is far less confident than his everyday image suggests; they become essential to each other. Ellie, envied by her peers as a magical dancer, a runner, a model, carries the physical and psychological scars of a major childhood illness. Violet is academically the most able of the four, but feels unsure of her place in the school community as one of the very few Black students.
It may well be that the most rewarding way to be drawn into the ambition and tension of this novel, including the gathering power of its conclusion (largely narrated by the perceptive March) is to ignore the plot device of the Inquest and to surrender to Milano’s fundamental concern: ‘ordinary people saving the world’. That way, readers may well become immersed in the reflective streams of the narrators’ thoughts as they revisit the horror of Ambereve even as they record the depth of the new relationships the night has brought.