The title has a foreboding feel, suggesting that “good parents” is just a phrase, decorative, like “Christmas cheer”, but lacking in practical application and moral truth. This fine novel examines familial relationships from every point of view, uncritically exposing the devouring needs of visceral love and the guile, indifference and resource deployed by its objects in their necessary bids for escape. It is set against backgrounds of cosmopolitan Melbourne, a small country town, a beach-house, a forest, and a tea plantation in Ceylon, all wonderfully realised.
The story begins in 2000. Young Maya, newly arrived in Melbourne, is in love with her middle-aged boss. His wife dies and he persuades her to leave with him and his business associate, the mysterious, half-seen Mr T, to some unspecified destination. Off she goes, vanishing without trace. Her parents, Jacob and Toni, arrive on a planned visit.
Maya’s housemate Cecile insists that they stay on with her in the hope that Maya will soon return. She does not return. Weeks pass; the police are unhelpful. Desperation and terror possess the parents. Day by day, they search the city to no avail. Jacob wrenches his foot in a grating and is confined to the house. This is a masterly touch. How often does someone closely involved in a family disaster suddenly disable himself? And I say himself advisedly. Jacob passes the time by considering his past, questioning his assumptions and illusions.
At Maya’s age, Toni herself disappeared, to marry her enigmatic stranger. Back then, Jacob had been reading Tolstoy instead of swotting for his exams. He moved on into the 1970s, grew his hair, rolled joints, tried to write. Now he is aware that what he still calls the “Tolstoy factor”, and others would call work displacement, may have brought him an artistic vision but it had also made him distrust himself. Unable to do anything practical about his missing daughter, he smokes dope with Cecile’s nasty friend Dieter.
There is much reference here to the importance of generations. Magnus, Maya’s younger brother, makes a compilation tape to further a middle-aged romance. Toni, in her wretchedness, goes off to an ashram outside Melbourne, a truly 1970s enterprise. She returns shaven-headed, with a desire for a life apart from Jacob. She admits she still doesn’t know what she means by “good”. And they both have always intended to be good. Jacob, too, has inklings of a new life where he will shed the parental role, and show his real self. But the moment the mystery of Maya’s disappearance is elucidated, they are swept back into their familial maelstrom, abandoning all lessons learnt, in favour of the compelling present and the definition that parenthood bestows on them. The story’s ending is open, but a telephone call that will lead to a lot more trouble is already being made.
Joan London introduces a vivid range of characters and treats each one, no matter how minor, with detailed respect, sympathy, and never with condescension. These are people one wants to go on knowing, in places one wants to revisit. The narrative focus shifts from person to person and is studded with sharp and eccentric observation. Jacob’s penchant for feeling like a character in a film strengthens him when he elopes with Toni. Road movies always come out right. “We’re not parents like your parents,” he says later. “From the start this was an article of faith between them.” But also from Maya’s birth, Toni has been aware of tension. Not many authors have treated the excruciating pain that children, often randomly and equally often with deadly intent, inflict on their parents.
Most marvellous, in a book crammed with delights, is London’s descriptive writing: “The old-fashioned chortling of magpies in an empty playground” or this, of convent girls at prayer: “The clap of their skirts, as they fell to their knees, like birds landing.” Her prose is sumptuous, beautifully balanced with the controlled spare elegance of her narrative voice. The final message, if you can call it that, is bleak. Love won’t make you a good parent. You can’t be a good parent, but you might try to be a good person, or you could try to disengage. Otherwise, you might aspire to be efficient.
London is a writer hugely admired in her native Australia and in America but, in spite of having been longlisted a few years ago for the Orange Prize with her novel Gilgamesh, she is scarcely known in Britain. This splendid book deserves to be blazoned forth. We may not all be parents, but we are all elderly children.