When I was at the launch of Maggie Dana's Beachcombing the other week, I met, albeit briefly, Sue Cook who I remember well from seeing her on the BBC. She told me she had written a book and I, never backward in coming forward, thrust one of my newly printed business cards into her hand (I had been spreading them around like confetti all day - the bus conductor nearly got one but sanity prevailed...) and said Oh do send me a copy. Well, lo and behold she did and it arrived yesterday and I sat down with cup of tea and biccy (must get out of this habit) and read it straight through without stopping, as it was immensely readable and grabbed my interest straight away.
The tag line on the cover is 'the trouble with a secret is that someone always knows it' and this is very canny marketing as you start to wonder what it is and even if you flick through the book it is not immediately apparent and no clues in the opening pages. We meet Mark Elflick, a troubled man with a secret, who is lying to his wife as he drives off to park and watch the residents of a particular house in a particular street. We wonder why he is doing this and as we see he is watching and trailing a mother and child, we begin to get a bit edgy....
Mark and his wife Jenny have a daughter Chloe who was conceived using IVF and after years of striving for this long awaited child, they should be happy but Mark has discovered the whereabouts of another daughter born to a couple using one of their remaining embryos left when Jenny could not use any more of them due to a hysterectomy. Somewhere out there is a child, who is genetically theirs, and he becomes obsessed with seeing this other child, and checking that she is well and happy and has gone to good parents.
Having signed away all legal rights to these embryos he is on dangerous ground and is persuaded by his wife to leave well alone, but is arrested by the police some years later when he is found loitering outside Leonie's school when once more he is concerned for her welfare after the violent death of her mother. While I have every sympathy with Mark and his desire to know what is happening to his daughter, he has no rights at all and Leonie's father, having just lost his wife, is quite rightly antagonistic towards his intrusion in his life and that of his unknowing daughter.
I found Mark an incredibly selfish and obsessive personality and found it hard to evoke any sympathy for him, my sympathies were all with the 'other' father, but this is a mark of the standard of writing and characterisation that I felt this way, and perhaps that was the whole idea. He is selfish, he is obsessive, but he is also tormented by the knowledge that he has another child and cannot come to terms with it.
So, we are back to the 'nature v nurture' debate. You are biological parents and have had nothing to do with the child's upbringing, but surely characteristics inherited must come out at some stage, or will the nurturing and love of the other parents win out? There is no easy answer to this and in Force of Nature the pitfalls of such technology and the impact on the children involved are beautifully illustrated. Making these the basis of a novel is an excellent way of making us think about these matters, an article in a medical journal or a documentary on the TV might not have the same impact nor reach a wide audience, but a well written and compelling book, which this is, will succeed in doing so.
'Modern science can do wonderful things. It can help the blind to see and the lame to walk. It can give a childless couple a longed for baby. What it can't do is control human emotions'
Recommended,
