Green Man Running, by Georgina Hammick

Georgina Hammick is unusual among novelists in having established herself first as a writer of short stories. In Green Man Running, her second novel, she has stretched the story canvas outward, while retaining her surety of focus, her eye for the particular and her ear for the rhythms of everyday exchange, thus giving the novel a satisfying sense of being well filled, replete.

This is an essentially comfortable story about uncomfortable people – people in situations they don't quite like but lack the power to do much about. The title alludes, we discover late on, to the running green figure seen at exit signs. It provides an amusingly apposite image for the novel's central character, a man always running for the exit but somehow never managing to get anywhere.

Desmond Bucknell, as a child, has already had one attempt at reinventing himself. Months after a tragic accident on his father's farm, caused by someone's (his?) failure to close a gate, he rechristens himself Dexter – after the Sussex and England batsman – and attempts to turn his back on all that farm life represents.

For a time he succeeds, becoming a senior editor in a London publishing house. But, having achieved marriage and two young sons, he is abruptly left by his wife, Hyacinth, and finds himself the hard-pressed single parent. Dexter casts off his career, moves to Bethnal Green, in the East End of London, and embarks on a penurious life of freelance copy-editing and child care.

Hammick's description of life as a single father is kinder and rounder than Nick Hornby's more abrasive version in About a Boy, perhaps because hers is an altogether more feminine account. Without ever descending into earnestness, and with a humorous eye, she gets the details right: picking up dirty socks from the bedroom floor; the longing to recover the sense of being a family, the "criss-cross connectors that had once linked child to mother, father to child, child to child, mother to father"; and the way in which the early sympathy of the local mothers' gang quickly turns into something rather more judgemental.

She is also entertaining on the subject of the competing demands of domestic banalities vs deadlines that beset the home-based freelance. Dexter takes out his professonal frustrations by employing a particularly savage method of copy-editing, which involves much writing of "Not that funny?" and "Delete" on typescripts. He is, meanwhile, besieged by long letters from his ex-wife, littered with question marks "where normal people would normally put a full stop", which "transformed an otherwise straightforward statement... into a calculating and insolent threat."

Hammick's skill is to develop her central character so that we re-evaluate him, rather than write him off. Dexter's ambitions return – if not his success. His dissatisfactions mount. He also cuts a bit of a dash as a writing tutor, and ends up securing the affections of a stained-glass artist called Moy (who has managed to avoid the "overall dusty look" that can afflict "women in their early forties").

This history is related by Hammick in a seemingly effortless slipping-back-and-forward in time. The main action is confined within the span of the council's "Fun Week" – although, predictably perhaps, there is not much fun to be had by Dexter, nor a great deal of action. The dramatic climax, such as it is, comes when he chastises a couple of rough types for letting their dog defecate on the green opposite his house and ends up with a bit more than a punch on the nose. But that scene is undercut later on when Dexter's written account of it is dismissed by an editor as overly stereotyped.

Hammick is more successful, perhaps, in her quiet scenes of inaction. She is very good at family conversation in particular, and never better than with a couple in bed, talking in the early hours. She writes about the things that families know, but with an arresting sharpness, and with pin-pricks of wit, that keep the reader pleasurably alert.