I started reading Salley Vickers realtively recently. About five years ago I came across Miss Garnet's Angel while looking for a couple of things to read on holiday. I think of novels as narratives of human experience in imaginary form. They can be contemporary or placed in another time and place, the plot can be linear, multi-layered or oscillating between times and places. The narrative drive, the complexity of the characters, the social or historical context, the dilemmas, tensions and resolutions are each part of a mixture which is endless in creative possibility for the skilled storyteller. Because the good novelist, for myself at least, has to be a consumate storyteller who early on in the novel persuades you that this story is interesting, these people matter, and I care enough to know how it all grows and goes and turns out in the end.

Miss Garnet's Angel did that for me. I've now read all her novels, including this her latest, The Librarian. What's not to like, if you're a reader? Libraries and librarians, books and children discovering the world of the imagination, and the library as community hub threatened by the remorseless knotweed of budget cuts and local politics. The title will be enough for many novel readers. What makes Vickers' such an accomplished novelist is the way she takes seriously the complexities, mysteries and predictabilities of human behaviour and human relatedness. This is the story of a young woman in the late 1950's, going as children's librarian to an English market town. The socially constrained and unexciting routines of post war town life are deceptive, because like all human communities the town has its alliances and divisions, long held grudges and deep seated loyalties. And the people are unremarkable, from the several children who become the focus of the story to the several adult protagonists who range from the dislikeable to the too good to be true – almost. 

Because Vickers is a moral realist. "Good" people are capable of behaving in ways that can be dishonest, thoughtless, well meaning but mistaken and with significant consequences which influence, even determine the future of "innocent" others. And those who for whatever reasons "intend harm", can in a novel and in real life, unwittingly set in train circumstances and events which turn out to be someone else's "luck". Not only what we do, but why we do it; not only what we think, but the kind of person we are who thinks such things; not only circumstances of inheritance, context and personality, but how these grow and develop over time; these and much else arise out of the incredibly complex and elusive mystery that is the human heart, mind, self and being, and each of these as we come into relation with other such people.

In her best novels, Salley Vickers gets to the heart of human self-awareness as that impinges on and is shaped by all those other selves amongst whom we live and move and have our being.  As a previous teacher of children with additional support needs, a Jungian psychiatrist, and a lecturer in English Literature,  Vickers draws on deep wells of human experience. But of course our greatest insights come when raw human experience is processed, reflected upon, compared and contrasted with our own inner lives and the outer lives of those with whom we live and talk and share time and space.Having an experience is one thing; learning from it is quite another. Assimilated experience, reflected upon and processed into writing like this displays an enriched wisdom.

The Librarian is a book which allows Vickers to play to her own strengths as observer, questioner, analyst and empathetic narrator of human stories. Sylvia Blackwell the librarian is also a daughter with parents reluctant to relinquish control, she is inexperienced in love and relationships and thus vulnerably innocent, warmly idealistic about books, children and the wonders of reading as a power that can shape and reshape life. The various children have home backgrounds that differ, from the emotionally robust to the fragile, and scarily vulnerable – but all of them one way or another come within the orbital pull of the library and its children's librarian. Then there are the adults, the apparently staid WI, the amorous GP, the head librarian who is both ridiculous and spiteful, the neighbour from Hell, and one or two people who are no nonsense good folk and whose determination to interfere with events make all the difference to how the story ends.

Yes but what's the book about? It's about reading. Reading alters the inner landscape, influences the inner climate, and allows new seeds of possibility to germinate and grow. It's about books and children and the trajectories which reading sets off in the imagination and leads to who knows where in later life. It's about friendship and self-interest and how the two can co-exist, sometimes painfully; it's about the malice of telling secrets and using truth to hurt; it's about love, infatuation, being used, wanting the best of both worlds, and discovering how fragile is the fabric out of which some of our most durable and formative experiences are created.

The Librarian is an old fashioned novel – it is even produced in a hardback edition with a front cover drawn from a 1934 painting (see above). I think the old fashioned format and style of writing is deliberate, and I found it an effective way of persuading the reader that the book they are reading is an important example of the novel's central argument; that reading fiction, inhabiting a story, enjoying a novel, is life changing. Such reading is a transformative process of supplying the intellect and emotions with new imaginary possibilities that shape and reshape often unconsciously, what we see, desire and come to want for our own reality.

Of course what we see and desire for our own reality often doesn't happen, sometimes cannot happen. Disappointment is written into the terms and conditions of a human life. Relationships fulfil and frustrate; friendships grow and can wither; as life moves on, many who are part of our lives for a while are left behind; ambition, hope, possibility may or may not be realised. But, as this novel weaves together towards its resolution,wer are asked to ponder an important life-truth. In all the vicissitudes and what today are euphemistically called challenges that make up our several lives, there is the inner urge towards whatever it is we have it in ourselves to be. There is nothing bleak in this book, nothing overtly dark. Except those apparently little spites and enmities, which when injected into the shared experience of a small community, have power to make or break lives.