Sue Townsend: Ghost Children

Reviewed by DAVID LARSEN*

It was recently my dubious pleasure to undergo what in politics would be termed a "full and frank exchange of views" with one of our local publishers, on the subject of negative reviewing.

There were various issues involved, but the nub of the matter was this: other reviewers had praised a book which I had roundly condemned. Who was I to sneer at something which the publisher, the author and those other reviewers all considered exciting and worthwhile?

I used the subjectivity defence (one reader's page-turner is another one's bonfire). It's a good defence, and in the reviewing game there's ultimately no getting away from it, but it has a habit of turning around and biting you.

Case in point: Sue Townsend's latest novel offends me on so many different levels that it simply kills me to acknowledge that some people will love it.

Townsend wrote the Adrian Mole books - the first two best-sellers, and the subsequent four, flops. There are some incidental similarities between those titles and this one - odd grace-notes such as the presence of a nameless, slightly pathetic dog, but at bottom they couldn't be more different.

Ghost Children is the story of a long-separated couple, Chris and Angela. Seventeen years ago, Angela secretly aborted their unborn child. Chris found out, and the relationship collapsed.

Angela is now trapped in a loveless marriage, and Chris is a recluse, still unable, after all these years, to accept Angela's choice. An odd chance leads to their meeting again. Can they recover from their past mistakes?

Meanwhile, a parallel storyline tracks the appalling fate of a little girl called Storme, abused and neglected by her parents. "They shouldn't be allowed to breed," mutters the surgeon who eventually treats the child's fractured skull.

By this point in the book, it's very clear that Angela - love-bereft, childless, haunted by visions of the daughter she could have had - is Townsend's case against abortion. Storme, a child seemingly condemned to a slow death by criminally irresponsible parents, might be considered a nod to the moral complexities of the pro-choice versus pro-life debate.

But she isn't. In this book, moral complexities don't exist. All questions have straightforward answers. In Storme's case, the answer is adoption, and all choices are either good or bad.

Okay, fine. There are intelligent, well-meaning people who do see the world in these terms. The reason I want very much to announce that this book is truly, deeply, unforgivably bad, and that no thinking human being should be capable of enjoying it even a little bit, is not that I think it's morally simplistic, though I do. It's that Townsend has sufficient skill to portray pain - the pain of lost love, of lost opportunities, of hard choices made right and of hard choices made wrong - and what she does with that skill is to give a Disney cartoon version of the world, the illusion of reality.

In this book, if you've spent years longing for your ex-wife, it will turn out that she doesn't really love her new husband. Furthermore, when she finally gets up the nerve to leave her new husband, it will turn out that he's a scoundrel who deserves to be left. Terrible deeds done by terrible people will leave no lasting scars, and even menopause and hard-hearted adoption policies won't stand in the way of anyone who truly deserves to be a parent.

It's smug moralising and easy sentimentality, all dressed up as harsh social realism.

This will be, I don't doubt, some reader's page-turner. It's very definitely my bonfire. Pass the matches.

Penguin, $26.95

* David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer.