A Girl's Guide to Modern European Philosophy, by Charlotte Greig

Charlotte Greig's first novel begins with its narrator, Suzie, screaming herself out of a dream. She is prone to nightmares, but untroubled by them in the reasoning light of day, when she attends seminars at Sussex University.

She describes herself as "a clueless philosophy student", and does seem short on insight into herself and the 1980s world she inhabits. She fails to notice that her live-in lover, Jason, is charmless, misogynistic and gay. She has an affair with a fellow-student, Rob, whose main interest in her is having sex, which his own girlfriend is denying him.

Suzie dismisses The Female Eunuch as "tabloid journalism", preferring Nietzsche's idea of "the free spirit" to Greer's vision of female emancipation. But when she falls pregnant (her notion of contraception being to carry her pills in her bag and take one every now and then), she is surprised that Jason is annoyed that he may not be the father, and Rob isn't keen to get married.

Unaware that her philosophy tutor is in the throes of some sort of psychotic breakdown, she offers her pregnant self to him. When he declines the role of father figure, she finally realises: "I was on my own... There would have to be a sacrifice: my child or my work."

Throughout this faintly dated tale, Suzie reads her course books and tries to write a dissertation, which comes to stand as the novel's ongoing enquiry as to whether philosophy can really change a girl's life. As she thinks of Schopenhauer's "dance of life"; as she feels "that what Heidegger was on about ... could change the way I thought about everything"; as Kierkegaard "blows her mind", we assume that "the terrible mess" of motherhood is a necessary part of Suzie's dance, which she will embrace resolutely and alone.

In this optimistic scheme, the period feel of Suzie's relaxed, domestic and practical voice might serve as a nourishing female counterpart to the inscrutable prose of the male philosophers that she quotes, and who we assume will save the day, and the life of her unborn child. This fecund narrative freedom turns out to be as dark as Suzie's own nightmares, however.

She has a termination, paid for with money that her father left her – remaining a child, effectively, for whom a Guide to Modern European Philosophy might as well be a work of fiction. Presumably that is Grieg's point. Perhaps she sometimes wakes up screaming, too.

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