A Family Matter by Claire Lynch: Serviceable, highly readable but a bit preachy
A Family Matter
Author
:
Claire Lynch
ISBN-13
:
978-1784745837
Publisher
:
Chatto & Windus
Guideline Price
:
£16.99
Susan Sontag wrote of Camus (along with the other 'husbandly writers', Baldwin and Orwell) that the issue with his fiction was how apparently his art 'is always in the service of certain intellectual conceptions which are more fully stated in the essays. Camus' fiction is illustrative, philosophical.'
This is the issue I can't help but take with A Family Matter, an otherwise perfectly serviceable, highly readable novel. It centres on the author's (very noble) desire to illustrate the hideous treatment of lesbian mothers in the British courts in our extremely recent history. This worthwhile cause ought to be known more widely.
And although I certainly might have guessed loosely at the devastating outcomes for homosexual parents seeking custody of their children in our not-so-distant pasts (the flashback sections of the book are set in the 1980s), Lynch's novel expanded my previously vague knowledge.
The problem is, I would prefer not to be given my political and moral education in story form. When it comes to novels, I'm looking for art, and ideally entertainment. Instead, novels such as these, with a particular parabolic message, can read a bit, well, preachy. Like the expansion of one of those awful sloganised T-shirts or hats.
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And although politics is dipping its muddy toes in art more and more, I still believe that most people picking up a novel, rather than a nonfiction book or a newspaper, don't especially want to feel they're being hit over the head with some injustice or other.
Luckily, Lynch's explanatory essay, outlining the actual facts of the history, has been placed at the back, rather than the front, of the book. The inclusion of such essays dilute the respectability of fiction with an alacrity only matched by a BookTok campaign. You can almost feel the words turning grey and dripping off the page.
Having said all this, Lynch writes some exceptionally beautiful sentences, worth underlining. She is acutely insightful when it comes to domestic life, the strange drudgery of a mother's daily living. I wanted much more of this, and hope it's explored in whatever she writes next.
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Irish Times
6 hours ago
- Irish Times
Irish influencers trolled on Tattle life: ‘They said I'm a bad mum. That I'm ugly. They wrote my address on it'
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Irish Times
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The bond between John Lennon and Paul McCartney: ‘For sure they loved each other... they found a way to share that love with the world'
In 2020, in the enforced stillness of a pandemic lockdown, Ian Leslie sat down to write a long, impassioned defence of Paul McCartney . The resulting 10,000-word essay, published on his Substack, the Ruffian, contended that McCartney is an underrated musical and cultural force. Leslie did not expect much reaction 'for a piece arguing that Paul McCartney was good at music', but it went viral, drawing praise from Beatles scholars and fans around the world. For Leslie, a self-described Gen X Beatles fan who fell in love with the band through his parents' LPs, that essay was the beginning of something much bigger. 'Because the piece was praised by people who knew a lot about The Beatles, I thought, maybe I've effectively just given myself licence to write about them … but I didn't think it was an option, because I didn't have that background and, obviously, there are a lot of books about The Beatles, as I am constantly being reminded,' he says. 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'We're used to the idea of men being good friends, or fierce competitors, or sometimes both. We're thrown by a relationship that isn't sexual but is romantic, a friendship that may have an erotic or physical component to it, but doesn't involve sex.' In each chapter Leslie takes a deep dive into a song to more fully understand the Lennon-McCartney bond. Each of the 23 songs in the book, from Come Go with Me, the song Lennon sang at their fateful 1957 church-fete meeting in Woolton village, to Here Today, the song McCartney wrote after Lennon was murdered, in 1980, become emotional landmarks. When Leslie writes about a work as ubiquitous as She Loves You, he somehow manages to restore the shock of how new it once sounded. Reading the book, you find yourself stopping to listen to each song – and, with Leslie's insights, hearing them in a different way. 'I knew pretty much from the beginning that's what I wanted to do,' he says. 'I don't think you can separate the music from the relationship, and these were guys who lived and thought and felt and communicated through songs. They learned to do that as teenagers in each other's bedrooms and front parlours, and that becomes their primary channel of communication about the things they care about most.' Although Leslie's book veers away from indulging the polarising narrative around the two friends, he admits that he has always been 'a Paul person'. 'He was the one who fascinated me. I felt he'd been treated unfairly in terms of his reputation,' Leslie says. For me, as a fellow Paul person, one of the successes of the book is that it draws me more towards Lennon. Leslie is pleased about this. 'I wanted to be careful that I wasn't biased. I'm glad that it kind of sent you to John. I mean, partly, that's what happened to me as well, because I set out with that kind of approach, to say, 'Look, these two guys basically created each other.' Paul McCartney and John Lennon at the Finsbury Park Astoria, London, in December 1963. Photograph: Val Wilmer/Redferns 'It's ridiculous to talk about John versus Paul, right? You couldn't have one without the other musically, creatively speaking, and even in terms of personality. So as I was researching and writing the book I was sort of opening my own mind to how extraordinary John was.' John & Paul, Leslie explains, was a balancing act. It needed to be accessible to people who didn't know much about their back story, 'which is a lot of people, especially young people'. At the same time, 'the material had to feel fresh even if you know all about The Beatles'. He was working on three levels. 'One is what happened. It's important to me that we tell the story of The Beatles and not just assume people know it,' Leslie says. 'The second level is the John-and-Paul relationship. And the third thing is the music, and how does the music change and develop? They all have to be interwoven, so you can see how they're all playing off against each other. That was basically the challenge of writing it.' What the book powerfully communicates is the sheer unlikeliness of what Lennon and McCartney created. Leslie returns often to the mystery of their personal and musical partnership. How did two working-class young men, in a postwar industrial city, end up making the greatest popular music of the 20th century? How did both of them turn out to be world-class songwriters and singers? 'It's almost a kind of magical meeting, the two of them coming together at that time,' Leslie says. 'Sometimes you worry that if you're enchanted by something the magic will go, because it'll just become a series of facts and information. And actually, in this case, it's kind of the opposite. I think, in terms of The Beatles and John and Paul's relationship, the more you learn about it, the more detail you accumulate, the more mysterious and enchanting it gets. And I wanted to convey a little bit about that in the book.' When you're writing a story that's so familiar to so many, 'it can feel like the author knows exactly how and why all of this happened … so now and again I sort of step outside the frame and go, 'I don't know how this happened',' Leslie says. This incredibly vitriolic song is not the kind of song you write about somebody that you're exhausted by, or that you're bored by, that you just can't be bothered with It's why John & Paul begins with Lennon and McCartney's first meeting, on a hot summer's day, 12 years after the end of the second World War and a decade before Sgt Pepper. 'I wanted to capture that. John's there at the fete, playing bad skiffle, when he first meets Paul, and 10 years later they're making a psychedelic masterpiece that revolutionises music. It's hard to believe ... I still don't understand it,' Leslie says. He suspects some kind of 'hidden hand' in this. He mentions Rick Rubin's well-ventilated theory that The Beatles were the best proof available of the existence of God. 'The more you look into the story of The Beatles, that's how I feel about it. I can't explain this.' The book is particularly revealing about the acrimony that developed between the two friends in later years, and how their relationship ebbed and flowed after The Beatles split, when Lennon was with Yoko Ono in the United States and McCartney had settled into family life with his wife Linda. 'Most relationships or marriages end because the partners essentially get bored or exhausted by each other. The fire goes out altogether. That's why a lot of long-running groups split up eventually,' Leslie says. That didn't happen with The Beatles 'because they essentially split up prematurely, when they were making the best music of their career. This never happens'. 'You split up because you're not very good or you're making mediocre music, the spark is gone and you're a bit bored and so on. They never did that. They split up and they have this terrible argument when they're still doing incredible stuff.' Lennon's song How Do You Sleep?, which is full of cruel digs at McCartney, features in the book for good reason. 'This incredibly vitriolic song is not the kind of song you write about somebody that you're exhausted by, or that you're bored by, that you just can't be bothered with. It's a song you write when you really want somebody's attention, because you have very, very strong feelings about them,' Leslie says. The Beatles in 1976: Ringo Starr, John Lennon, George Harrison and Paul McCartney. Photograph: Getty Images Arguably, they were still being inspired by each other when Lennon was fatally shot outside the Dakota, his apartment building in New York, and Leslie is insightful about the emotional fallout for McCartney of his best friend's death. In the book he describes McCartney's appearance on Desert Island Discs years later, visibly struggling not to cry as one of his chosen songs, Lennon's Beautiful Boy, is played. What does Leslie think Lennon would be up to now, had he lived? 'The thing about John Lennon is that he's never really what you want him to be, which is why he's so cool and fascinating and interesting. I don't think he'd ever settle into your nice, sweet grandad mode. I think he would have been on Twitter, you know, saying the most terrible things.' Did he have revelations about McCartney and Lennon as a fan himself while writing the book? 'Absolutely. It's such complex music, even when it sounds very simple, that you can always go back to it and hear different things. And, yes, that happened to me, but it was also the mission of the book to take something very familiar that we take for granted and ask people to think about it again,' Leslie says. 'We think we know The Beatles. We think we know John and Paul. I wanted to reastonish people with what they did and who they were. And, of course, the music is absolutely essential to that. I want people to hear I Want to Hold Your Hand and go, 'Oh my God,' or She Loves You and go, 'This is actually incredible. It's not just this song, it's a masterpiece,' you know.' Not even Lennon and McCartney, the mercurial protagonists themselves, could decode the full mystery of their bond. In one of the final quotes in the book, from 1981, McCartney remarks that they 'never got to the bottom of each other's souls'. 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Irish Times
7 hours ago
- Irish Times
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