'Waterland' with bricks instead of eels

Cryers Hill is the story of two boys who love two girls. Growing up in the same village, they are separated only by a generation; their childish preoccupations are the same in 1934 as in 1969 - though one spends his long summer trapping rabbits in the corn fields while his successor hunts builders' detritus on the creeping housing estate. It examines the archaeology of memory: how the past is covered over by experience.

In 1934, Walter is in love with Mary Hatt. He longs to be a poet, but isn't very good. They swim in the pond in the woods, where young lovers are not supposed to go. He wishes he really had something to write about - he doesn't know that, come 1939, he will.

In 1969, Sean dreams of becoming an astronaut. He loves Ann, and they hang out on the building site where bored children are not supposed to play. Sean struggles with the "liar alphabet", the 1970s experimental "ITA" system for teaching children to read. He tries to crack the code of language using letters from a soldier that he finds in an old lady's house, dated 1942. A little girl is found murdered in the woods.

It is not easy for a 45-year-old woman to think like a nine-year- old boy, but at its best, Kitty Aldridge's language captures the casual brutality of childhood like a butterfly in a net. Sean slopes around the building sites muttering "wur" and "bludyell". He watches a smaller boy crying, "the tears moving the dirt around his face", and observes as "some boys were hanging around, breaking things". The best bits are reminiscent of David Mitchell's Black Swan Green, Geoffrey Willans' Molesworth books or Graham Swift's Waterland, with bricks instead of eels. It is only a pity that these bigger boys' books got there first, and cleverer.

For this is a woman's novel in the worst, most stereotypical ways. One adjective will never suffice where seven can be found. A conceit cannot be stretched too far. The building site's "almost houses", waiting half-finished for lives yet to be lived, are a neat little metaphor - as is the "liar alphabet" and adult codes - but Aldridge rubs our noses in them.

The stretching of points does serve to highlight that nothing really happens in the novel. Which perhaps is the point. These are everyday lives, lived by the small kind of people who do not get memorials. So when Walter goes to war, it hits home: these are the ordinary people that history is really made of. It is just a shame that nothing has to happen for 200 pages in order to prove it.

It is also sad that among the overwritten details are characters who get lost. I would have liked to see more of Walter's disappointed mother, and less of the TV astronauts and ready meals that David Mitchell described so much more convincingly only last year. Ultimately, this novel does loving service to "people like you and me [who] don't get recorded [in] books and CinemaScope". But like so much in 1969, it could have done with a little less conversation and a little more action, please.

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