15 hours ago
A Family Matter by Claire Lynch: Serviceable, highly readable but a bit preachy
A Family Matter
Author
:
Claire Lynch
ISBN-13
:
978-1784745837
Publisher
:
Chatto & Windus
Guideline Price
:
£16.99
Susan Sontag wrote of Camus (along with the other 'husbandly writers', Baldwin and Orwell) that the issue with his fiction was how apparently his art 'is always in the service of certain intellectual conceptions which are more fully stated in the essays. Camus' fiction is illustrative, philosophical.'
This is the issue I can't help but take with A Family Matter, an otherwise perfectly serviceable, highly readable novel. It centres on the author's (very noble) desire to illustrate the hideous treatment of lesbian mothers in the British courts in our extremely recent history. This worthwhile cause ought to be known more widely.
And although I certainly might have guessed loosely at the devastating outcomes for homosexual parents seeking custody of their children in our not-so-distant pasts (the flashback sections of the book are set in the 1980s), Lynch's novel expanded my previously vague knowledge.
The problem is, I would prefer not to be given my political and moral education in story form. When it comes to novels, I'm looking for art, and ideally entertainment. Instead, novels such as these, with a particular parabolic message, can read a bit, well, preachy. Like the expansion of one of those awful sloganised T-shirts or hats.
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And although politics is dipping its muddy toes in art more and more, I still believe that most people picking up a novel, rather than a nonfiction book or a newspaper, don't especially want to feel they're being hit over the head with some injustice or other.
Luckily, Lynch's explanatory essay, outlining the actual facts of the history, has been placed at the back, rather than the front, of the book. The inclusion of such essays dilute the respectability of fiction with an alacrity only matched by a BookTok campaign. You can almost feel the words turning grey and dripping off the page.
Having said all this, Lynch writes some exceptionally beautiful sentences, worth underlining. She is acutely insightful when it comes to domestic life, the strange drudgery of a mother's daily living. I wanted much more of this, and hope it's explored in whatever she writes next.
