Jo Walton, My Real Children (2104)

A jonbar-point family saga that construes two versions of its central character and leaves them in a kind of strange superposition. Patricia Cowan grows to maturity through World War 2, in which conflict she loses her only sibling, a brother, as well as her father. After the war she goes to Oxford, where she shows promise. She also meets an emotionally strangulated (because closeted) man called Mark who proposes marriage. She accepts, and doesn't accept, in the two parallel timelines. In the first, she sinks into a miserable life with the horrid, cruel and uncaring Mark, through a series of exhausting births and miscarriages, into a 1960s and 1970s where, late to the party, she embraces Women's Lib and starts to put together a life of her own. In the other timeline, she finds happiness with a woman called Bee, becomes an expert in Italian Renaissance art, and creates an oasis of joy, having children on her own terms via donated sperm.

Its high-concept Sliding-Doors-y premise aside, this is a thoroughly old-fashioned piece of novel writing, which fact is both good and bad for the success of the whole. Amongst the good, and bordering on the very good, is its absorbing, unfussy attention to lived experience, and the way that generates a genuinely moving emotional weight. Also good is the way Walton sets up her sad life/happy life divide—which of course runs the risk of being a little too pat, dramatically speaking—only in order to give it a good shake. In the second half of the novel, Patricia A ('Trish') discovers a strength and purpose that her decades of misery seem almost to have prepared her for: she divorces her ghastly husband and leads a socially useful, engaged life. Patricia B ('Pat') however finds that decades of happiness have not readied her terribly well for the, slightly arbitrary (that's life I suppose) trials of her later decades. But there are downsides too, though, in the way My Real Children is made. One is that the narration sometimes strays into flatness and telling-not-showing. It's not a long novel, and covering more or less the whole 20th-century not once but twice means that we rattle through major events rather too briskly; the total is a summary of life rather than a recreation of lived experience. And the ending is a misfire, which is a shame, because Walton has built up a considerable reservoir of readerly good-will by then. Still, I like that the jonbar-point is not something that has to do with wars or assassinations; I liked the SFnal touches (moon bases, voyages to Mars); and the research was, as far as I could see, impeccable. Walton gets not only the facts and dates right, but the tone of repressed English desperation, of politeness as an idiom of loathing, of the strait-jacket of class and gender. I spotted only one error and it's vanishingly trivial; early in the novel we're told of Patricia at Oxford that 'Tolkien taught her Old English'. He wouldn't have called it that. It was one of his quirks that he studied 'Anglo Saxon' not 'Old English' (J.I.M. Stewart, who was himself taught by JRRT, records this fact in his semi-autobiographical novel Young Patullo (1975), where his based-on-Tolkien don Professor Timberlake rebukes Patullo for referring to Old English: 'you wouldn't call Latin Old Italian, now, would you?') But, now, look: I've gone completely off the point of the review. This is a fine, memorable novel, for all its flaws. It doesn't rise to the force or intensity of Kate Atkinson's peerless Life After Life, but it is, in its quiet way, moving and eloquent.