Booker club: The Clothes On Their Backs

This review has an unusual preface. Even before writing it, I've received a public (ahem) dressing down from the book's author, Linda Grant. When, on in an earlier blogpost, I lamented that my inner male chauvinist cringed at the idea of a book about clothes, Grant observed in the comments section that my profile picture suggested that I was "actually wearing clothes" and that they were therefore "not quite so peripheral" to my existence as I might pretend.

I include this information partly, of course, to show off. It's fun to be a critic who's been criticised by a Booker nominee. But mainly I mention it because I hope it casts an interesting light on the book in question.

Chastising someone who is due to write about your book in a public forum might not normally be considered politic if you're keen for a glowing notice, but it's possible to read into it a certain impetuous energy. Although Grant insists that the book is autobiographical only to the extent that she was "a pimp in World War II Budapest", that same energy infuses this work and enlivens her appealing narrator, the wardrobe-conscious Vivien Kovacs.

The daughter of Hungarian Jews who fled Budapest as the storms of the second world war gathered, Vivien tells of her coming of age in 1970s London and her struggle to understand her own family history. She's good company. She's eloquent, smart and full of vivacious charm. She's also headstrong, prone to calamitous misjudgement and tactless in many of her dealings - but these shortcomings just make her all the more likable - especially thanks to her willingness to face up to them.

Vivien's timid and reticent parents will tell her nothing about their shared history, but she eventually manages to piece together the story of her origins from her Uncle Sandor - a man her father says is a criminal who has brought shame on the family name. Loosely based on the infamous slumlord Peter Rachman, Sandor is a spivvy charmer "pungent with expensive aftershave" of whose photograph the Evening Standard once demanded "Is This The Face Of Evil?"

As well as screwing his tenants, Sandor is a pimp who inspires "a queasy nausea you don't want to touch", but he still enchants Vivien. Grant's humane portrayal reveals a man more complex than the tabloid ogre, who has committed ugly crimes, but has suffered much and - in spite of all - has "heart" to spare. The way he puts the ingenue Vivien through her paces and forces her to repeatedly reassess her own judgements is as amusing as it is enlightening.

This broad moral spectrum and shifting of perceptions within it is the heart of the novel. It also brings me back to Grant's comments about my own habit of getting dressed in the morning. Behind them lies a serious point that The Clothes On Their Backs makes with force and style: there's no escaping the way we present ourselves to the world, nor that the world will judge us according to the choices we make about our appearance.

Grant never overworks the metaphor but a sharp eye for telling detail effectively conveys the message. The fact that we come across Uncle Sandor in a sharp suit, National Front thugs in boots and rolled-up trousers, Vivien's mother in a brown felt waistcoat "to keep my back warm" speaks volumes about their various characters.

But it's Grant's gift to also show that there's much that outward appearance can't tell. Vivien's mother's dowdiness - we learn in a heartbreaking passage - is something that she feels has been enforced by her lameness. Uncle Sandor was also wearing flashy clothes when the second world war caught up with him and he was pressed into slave labour. And, we are told, "they were the ones he was wearing when he got back to Budapest in 1945, though they no longer resembled clothes but a kind of fungus excreted by his skin." Grant suggests that even the swastika can be taken the wrong way (in what is, admittedly, one of the book's weaker conceits).

There are a few problems. I spotted a couple of repetitions. Vivien's carnal travails are refreshingly unromantic, but never quite as interesting as her Platonic relationship with Sandor. But these are minor irritations, quickly brushed over when so much of the rest is such fun – as well as provocative and challenging. Grant may have plenty to say, but she never lets it get in the way of her very good story. Here is that much wished-for page-turner that is also a novel of ideas. It's definitely my favourite book on the shortlist so far. Which neatly proves Grant's point about the problems with first impressions - and just how wrong I can be when judging books by their covers.