Another Mother’s Son by Janet Davey - review

But Janet Davey is ambitious, clever and recklessly prepared to lose readers on every page in this, her fifth novel. The unpromisingness does not let up (the parents’ evening, for instance, is followed by a meeting to discuss the standard of A-level English teaching), yet by the end of this book you feel profoundly disturbed and enlightened: how did she do it?

As in Bruegel’s Fall of Icarus, and WH Auden’s poem about it, while Laura is concentrating on one thing — basically her whole life — the crises of other people’s are unrecognised or overlooked. And because she’s the narrator, you can only guess at her particular blindnesses. Convinced that something pivotal had happened in a car scene, I re-read it many times for clues, but had to conclude that in fact it was no more or less pivotal than any other. Whether that was a stroke of genius on the author’s part or not, it makes for a disturbing read.

Inside Laura’s head are a lot of odd observations that never quite rise to satire because they rarely get shared. An exception is when she is with fellow parent Ginny, whom we sense is a much nicer person than our narrator, and seems to be going off her in the last part of the book. Laura’s youngest son only speaks to her on suffrance: his disgust and impatience is painfully well described, as is Laura’s isolation in an absurd monologue of cajolery and admonition. There’s nothing wry about this; it’s appalling, as is the disgust of the teenagers themselves, which when put into action in the casual trolling of a teacher has its own tragic consequences.

Shafts of humour come in moments of solitude, as when Laura is staring at a life-size aspirational photograph in the school lobby (she does a lot of staring at things), showing three boys carrying briefcases and chatting: “I cannot imagine what was said or done to the boys to get them to behave like that. ‘Pretend you are middle managers at a conference, observed by the bigwigs and with bonus time looming’.” At other times, looking at her father’s girlfriend’s socks, or negotiating the disposal of a tea bag from a cup of canteen tea, there’s a manic edge to her sorrowfully active mind.

This is no crowd-pleasing novelist but a brave and perhaps rather brilliant one who is teaching readers to see things differently. And as her heroine reflects: “It might well be better to brazen things out, because brazening confers a feeling of strength whereas reparation debilitates.”

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