As a very hot spell of weather impended and my energy levels were diminishing I decided to access this novel by audio book, lie down by the side of a pool and allow the sentences to gently caress me. The lilting accent of an Irish female reader advanced me quickly into the heart of the story which is set initially in 1987, the year of the great storm when Cora has just given birth to her second child, a boy her husband wants to name Gordon after himself and the long line of Atkins patriarchs who preceded him.

If I had known from the outset the author was a believer in Nominative Determinism I don’t think I would have bothered. ND is the theory that your nature is determined by your name. Hence someone called Ivor Hardon will inevitably become a sexual philanderer, Buster Gutt will become a glutton and Justin Love a romantic melancholic. My name is Guido. In Italian this means “I teach, I counsel, I guide”. Did my name determine my behavioural traits then? I don’t think so. I became self-opinionated, judgemental, impatient, arrogant and egotistical all on my own. By coincidence one of my oldest friends is called Bear. Is he warm and cuddly and brave as Flo K might have us believe? Absolutely not. He’s a very angry fundamentalist Marxist with strong misogynistic tendencies. He has spent decades preaching to any idiot who will listen that Marxism is an infallible scientific project that contains the answers to ALL human problems. He’s mad……..So back to the novel:

Gordon is a five star free floating bullying bastard who has somehow created a professional reputation as a dedicated and caring GP. His wife Cora is timid, submissive and used as his domestic doormat. He tells her to register the baby’s birth as Gordon but, after talking to her daughter Maera, recklessly decides to disobey him and to christen the boy Bear. This is a plot contrivance to launch the narrative and the more we learn about Cora the less we shall believe she would have done such a crazy thing. For this transgression alone the psychopath Gordon beats her up. Her screams are heard by a neighbour who breaks in, tries to intervene and gets hurled through a glass door for his efforts.

There follow two more versions of the same scenario. In one the child is christened Julian and Gordon reacts by pushing Cora face first into a plate of celebration lasagne. In the other, Cora obediently registers the boy Gordon. Her reward is to avoid physical brutality. However she subsequently makes several strategic baby management errors that piss off her husband so much he hints that he may soon need to get rid of her as she is such a fucking hopeless mother.

At this juncture I wish to remind you that I am a self-opinionated and judgemental reader, utterly impatient with implausible or bad writing, so please don’t get too upset if you really enjoyed this novel……….Now back to the action:

This is a parallel universes novel – Sliding Doors brutal misogyny style. We leap forward seven years to see how the family is getting on. Well Gordon senior is in jail for murder, Maera identifies as lesbian and dotes on her little brother Bear while Cora has resurrected her flair for dancing. Julian and his sister are found living in rural Ireland with their widowed grandmother, Sylvia.. Cora is dead. Big Gordon is darkly referred to as him. Is he dead too? I guess we shall have to wait at least another seven years to find out. As for little Gordon, ironically he hates his name and likes to think of himself as Luke, after the skywalker, I assume. Big Dr Gordon in this parallel universe has gone from very bad to totally evil. He deprives Cora of money, punches her in the face, and won’t allow her to phone her mother. He’s a total control freak and finds some demeaning punishment for everything she does wrong. Alerted by a letter Maera writes to her granny, Sylvia gets a policeman sent round to the house. But Cora is too scared to run her husband in. He will only claim she is psychotic and delusional. And she will lose the kids. So she lies to the police, pretending her mum has dementia.

At this juncture I began to wonder if I might be enjoying this book more if I too had dementia? Or perhaps if my name was Barry which means innocent to the extent of utter naivety…….But on with the motley:

As we now hop another seven years forward I have doubts that I can take much more of the triple layered awfulness of this story. There’s two thirds of it left! I feel just the one story narrative layer would have been quite enough. No question it is all well written and suspenseful in a Woman’s Own sort of way. The author is accomplished at drip feeding us information. But I don’t want to be teased like that. I’m a Guido not a Barry. I want to jump to the crunch. I want to know how this schizoid monster was psycho-socially created and to see him get a violent come-uppance. Maybe he’s already got it anyway and we just haven’t officially been told? Jump forward another seven years and we find Bear visiting his sister in Brighton. Daddy Dr George will soon be released from jail, we are drip fed. He’s been doing a long stretch. Will he come looking for them when he is released, which is quite soon, they surmise? Meantime Cora goes on a date with someone. So who did Dr George kill, we are supposed to wonder, and why? Is it the neighbour he chucked through the door? Only another seven fictional years to wait for the answer, I yawn and switch off the light.

So the stories lumber onwards. We watch the two kids grow up, choose careers, find partners. We see their mum and grandmum advance respectively into middle and old age. Predictably Boy George turns out to be a rotter like his dad and gets his comeuppance in a disabling drunken road accident. Granny and her boyfriend Keenan seem to me just too gentle and caring to be true. The narrative feels like a contrived experiment that is in need of a radical revision. I don’t really care about any of them. I forget who they are. I get mixed up. The quality of the prose remains quite good although sometimes just a bit twee for my taste. Some scenes work dramatically well while others are tedious like decorative padding. I’m even fed up with Cora’s doormouse-like timidity. I only get focussed when Dr Mephistopheles George is around – but he is too one dimensionally monstrous – a pantomime villain. This is not to say men like him don’t abundantly exist. Or that patriarchy survives because we too often overlook them. It’s just that there’s a uniform preachiness to a lot of the writing, as if her audience are not properly clued up to how the adult world works. As if she’s writing for children. Which I think she is partly – for young teenagers and gullible adults like Barry, for the soft sentimental underbelly of the bookclub community.

In the final round, circa 2022, cuddly nice guy Bear is killed off by a wasp sting, unsure of himself Julian finds selfhood, a voice and true love with Orla while sleazy wide boy Gordon repents his errant vindictive ways and rescues his mum from the demonic dad. Oh please, Florence! That hidden camera blackmail stuff is so contrived – I don’t swallow it for a second and neither would that ultra vigilant psychotic husband. As for Dr Gordon he has a heart attack and dies on the kitchen floor where he’s so often made his wife grovel like a dog. It’s all a bit too melodramatic and ham-fisted and to rub salt into the readers’ wounds we then get an afterword lecture on what all the various names mean. Who cares?

If I’d been her editor all the twee nominative determinism stuff would have been dumped. Male domestic violence and the generational after tow of damage it reeks is a large enough subject on its own. I’d have liked much more about Dr Gordon’s upbringing and psychopathy. And drop the parallel universe fantasy. The book didn’t totally bore me but I was very glad to get it off my hands and return to my gritty real life obsession with test match cricket, Wimbledon and the ladies’ euro football.

2 STARS **