Walking Disaster, Chapter 21

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here.

This was initially a companion series to the magnificent Jenny Trout‘s review of the original novel, ‘Beautiful Disaster’. Jenny has since stopped her review, not wanting to give McGuire any further publicity in the wake of her attempts to run for office.

 

Content warning: Fighting, refusal to listen to concerns, breakup, refusal to accept breakup.

Chapter Twenty-One: Slow Death

Unfortunately, I think it a reasonable assumption that this will not in fact refer to Travis’s fate. Oh, well. At least we seem to have found our way to actual plot, after all that tiresome circling around on ‘I must have Abby but will never be worthy, whinge, whinge, drink, drink, shag, shag, misogyny, misogyny’. To recap where we’re up to: Travis is going to be fighting a very unpleasant fighter whom he’s sure he can nevertheless beat, and Abby is going to fulfil a bargain by having dinner with her ex-boyfriend, who is giving indications of wanting to shed the ‘ex’ part of that. So, The Drama all set up.

Yikes; I was reading through some old posts and realised that now I’m forgetting the puppy. Who the hell is taking care of the puppy while this foursome are off in Vegas, McGuire? Enquiring minds want to know. (Updated: He was with Brazil, apparently. At least McGuire remembered him this time.)

Anyway… chapter opens with Trav, America, and Shep in the waiting room prior to the fight, which is apparently going to be a cage fight, which is a new experience for Travis. Abby is off having dinner with Jesse as planned, and Trav is fretting about this as expected. Shep points out that he needs to get his mind off that and onto the problem of beating Brock McMann. Travis tells us that Brock is known for doing ‘blatantly illegal shit just out of sight of the ref’ and has been ‘banned from the UFC for sucker punches’. Also, apparently Travis has to win this fight, not just take part, in order for Benny to consider Mick’s debt paid; missed that detail when I was reading the last chapter. Shep advises him on strategy; play it safe and let Brock attack first.

Abby turns up at the last minute (as in, Brock and Travis are actually both in the cage ready to start) and she and Trav kiss through the cage bars. Not sure it’s the best of ideas to take your mind off the fighter in the cage with you who’s known for doing blatantly illegal shit, but maybe the ref was watching. Anyway, it’s all good, all’s right with Trav’s world now that Abby’s here, and he’s all set to go win this for her. He’s also still on a roll with the badass lines:

I leaned over to whisper in Brock’s ear. “I just want you to know I’m a big fan, even though you’re kind of a prick and a cheat. So don’t take it personally when you get KTFO’d tonight.”

Which apparently confuses the hell out of Brock. Anyway, the start bell rings and Travis immediately ignores Shepley’s advice and lets all his aggression out in punching ninety shades of hell out of Brock, and it works. It also feels very therapeutic:

I felt no pain, only the sheer pleasure of unleashing every negative emotion that had weighed me down for so long. I remembered how relaxing it felt to beat the hell out of Benny’s men.

Trav’s been doing the underground fights for over a year now. Why are these particular fights being framed as some kind of life-changing catharsis for Trav all of a sudden?

Win or lose, I looked forward to what kind of person I would be after this fight.

Maybe someone with better grammar? Probably not.

Trav and Brock get pulled apart as the round’s over. Second round, same as the first. Third round, they’re both getting tired but Travis manages to elbow Brock in the nose hard enough to knock him out, so he’s won. Cheers, wild applause, Abby gives him a victory kiss, great scenes for the eventual movie.

Benny wants to talk to Trav, so Abby reluctantly agrees to meet him outside in ten minutes. Benny, of course, wants to offer Trav a job; he’ll pay him $150,000 per fight for one fight a month, plus first-class tickets there and back if Trav wants to stay in college during this time. Trav shows some sense for once in his life and says he’s got to discuss it with Abby first. Abby ‘wasn’t receptive at all’, which I thought at first just meant she didn’t say much on the trip back but now suspect means she told him ‘no’ loud and clear and McGuire didn’t bother including the conversation.

(Yup. Just checked with ‘Beautiful’, and Abby was in fact emphatic, detailed, and consistent in telling Travis that a) it was a terrible idea to get involved in working for a mobster and b) she wanted absolutely no part of it, yes, including the money. Travis, of course, just kept brushing right past that with ‘but moneeeyyyyyy’. Portraying Travis here as not only disagreeing but ignoring and dismissing that whole conversation as just Abby not being ‘receptive’… that’s not nearly as good a look for Travis as McGuire seems to think.)

They get home. Abby is giving Toto a bath because he stinks from being in Brazil’s apartment over the weekend. Travis tells Abby that he wants to do the fights, and when she still says ‘No’:

“You’re not listening. I’m gonna do it. You’ll see in a few months that it was the right decision.”

Travis is disregarding Abby’s very clearly stated wishes and not only expecting her to put up with it, but blithely assuming that she will of course come round to his superior way of thinking. Just in case any of my readers were not already clear on this… behaving this way is really not a good idea. (For that matter, nor is signing on to work for the Mafia.)

We have another round of Abby making it completely clear that she wants nothing to do with Benny, any money earned from him, or that world, and Travis brushing this aside and telling her that she’ll see, it’s all going to be OK. Abby asks the obvious:

“Why did you even ask me, Travis? You were going to work for Benny no matter what I said.”

Travis tells her he wants her support, but it’s too much money to turn down. And Abby, in a quietly glorious moment, develops some actual common sense and a spine:

She paused for a long time, her shoulders fell, and then nodded. “Okay, then. You’ve made your decision.”

Well, granted, it’s odd that her shoulders were nodding. Other than that, however, this is a great way to respond to someone who’s determined to go their own way regardless of how hard you try to talk them out of it; accept you’re not going to change their mind and that the time’s come to get the hell out of Dodge, then from that point forward don’t bother with further arguing or ultimatums. Especially when you already know that they’d react very badly to knowing you plan to leave.

Travis, being Travis, completely fails to realise what Abby means and thinks everything’s now A-OK, so he goes happily out to make a sandwich and is unfazed by Abby walking past him and out the door with suitcase in hand, which, y’know, some people might have considered a subtle clue. He does run after her to ask what she’s doing, but because he has the approximate IQ of a pile of rocks he easily accepts her explanation that she’s just off to do laundry at the dorm. He doesn’t twig until he sees her crying as she drives off, whereupon, of course, he freaks out.

He sprints after the car yelling, realises he cannot actually outrun a car, and so leaps on his bike and races round to the dormitories, where he manages to trick someone into letting him in. He knocks on Abby’s door demanding that she talk to him, refuses to believe Kara when she says Abby’s not here and she hasn’t seen her for days, and barges in to see whether Abby’s hiding in a cupboard somewhere, which she is not. (Poor Kara!)

Then he sits outside the door sending off a barrage of texts running the gamut from begging her to talk about this to telling her she’s being unreasonable to apologising for saying that and going back to begging. All with textspeak ‘u’ instead of ‘you’, which I realise is a long way from being the most objectionable part of the situation but which happens to be one of my bugbears. I mean, seriously, we have text suggestion software now; no excuse.

Trav spends the whole night this way. Even he recognises he’s acting stupidly.

The fact that security had never showed to escort me out was amazing in itself

Lampshading! I really wish either Abby or Kara had called security; that would have been a better message both for Travis in-book and for readers.

Trav goes home, and Shep tells him Abby probably isn’t going to be in class today. Yes, probably not, since by my count it’s Sunday. Oh, well, we all know by now that McGuire can’t keep track of her own timeline. Speaking of which, it is mentioned that it’s winter and bitterly cold, so since we haven’t had any mention of Christmas it’s probably meant to be December. McGuire, I’m keeping an eye on you to see whether you screw that one up too.

Shep and America both try to tell Travis that Abby’s done with him, but Travis doesn’t want to hear it. He heads to class (which is happening, so I guess we lost a day somewhere, again) but Abby isn’t there. He stands up mid-lecture and kicks over her empty desk and then his, with a scream of ‘GODDAMMIT!’ Dare I hope that the lecturer will direct him to some therapy? For the moment, the lecturer just makes it clear he’s got to leave. Trav storms out and encounters Megan strolling up the corridor. She promptly tries to flirt with him and tell him she knew it would never work out with ‘the nun’, because McGuire apparently felt it had been too many chapters since she portrayed A Woman Who Is Not Abby as being awful. Also, she’s there to add to the angst factor:

“We’re the same, Travis; not good for anybody.”

…said no actual person ever. Anyway, Travis tells her to go away (I paraphrase) and walks off himself. Chapter ends. Well, at least quite a bit happened this time. It feels as though someone tilted the book and all the plot ran down to one end of it.

Walking Disaster, Chapter 20

(Oh, bother! It looks as though I might have managed to post this while it was still in draft stage and needed tidying up. My apologies to anyone who read the slightly mangled version. This one will, I hope, be at least marginally better.)

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here.

This was initially a companion series to the magnificent Jenny Trout‘s review of the original novel, ‘Beautiful Disaster’. Jenny has since stopped her review, not wanting to give McGuire any further publicity in the wake of her attempts to run for office.

 

Chapter Twenty: You Win Some, You Lose Some

EDITED AGAIN because I forgot the content warning: Physical violence with fights. Gambling. Casual racism.

The four of them pack and fly out to Vegas with Abby hardly saying a word the whole way. America checks them into the hotel ‘flashing her fake ID, as if she had done it a thousand times before’, which makes Travis realise she’d probably done precisely that and this is probably where they got the fake IDs in the first place. Which raises several questions:

  • The implication here is that Mick arranged the fake IDs so that Abby could win him money. Why on earth was he also paying for a fake ID for America, and why on earth were her family allowing some sleazeball to take their underage daughter off to casinos on a regular basis?
  • According to this post by Das Sporking, Vegas casinos are really strict about not letting underage people gamble, and they’re careful about checking IDs, especially if paying out on any big win. So… are we meant to believe that Mick was regularly taking his very young teenage daughter to these casinos without anyone ever at any point thinking ‘hang on, that girl looks like she might be underage; better be extra careful about checking that ID?’
  • Also, wait a minute… a couple of chapters back, one of Travis’s family mentioned that Mick gave interviews to ‘all the papers’ (implying national papers, if Travis’s family read them in another state) about his luck changing at midnight on Abby’s thirteenth birthday. So Mick made it clear in national papers that he was taking a child as young as twelve to gamble regularly (and at least once stay up past midnight doing so, during term time), and no-one from the casinos he attended regularly noticed? (Or CPS, for that matter?)
  • Now that I think about it, why on earth did multiple national papers care enough about the gambling woes of some metaphoric as well as literal loser that they were running articles about it?
  • As much as I love Das Sporking, could they make it any more difficult to find things in their archives?

Anyway, Travis checks in with Abby as to how she’s feeling and she just says she doesn’t want to be here. They go up to what turn out to be two separate rooms (one for each couple) in a very posh-sounding hotel, so, for a trip that’s meant to make money, they seem to be spending quite a bit of it up front. Travis is trying to be supportive to Abby (and for once he really does seem to be trying), but she doesn’t want to know, and doesn’t want him along when she goes to start gambling.

“If I’m going to win fourteen thousand dollars in one weekend, I have to concentrate. I don’t like who I’m going to be while I’m at those tables, and I don’t want you to see it, OK?”

I can’t get past this whole ‘win fourteen thousand dollars in one weekend’ plan. I mean, I know that if you’re good enough at poker it’s possible to make enough profit overall that you can make a passable living from it long term, and I know that occasionally you can get lucky enough to have a huge win. But, however good you are, you can’t expect to make $7000/day, because a significant part of it is always going to depend on literal luck of the draw.

Anyway, Travis actually respects what Abby says and backs off, which is almost as unlikely as winning $14,000 in a weekend. Yay, Travis! He and Shep go to check out the Strip while Abby plays. They see the Fountains of Bellagio, though Trav doesn’t know what they’re called (this has nothing to do with anything; I just think the Fountains of Bellagio are awesome and wanted to have an ‘I remember those!’ moment) and some other stuff and head back to the casino, where Trav sees Abby at one of the tables but still stays out of her way.

Before I can start liking the new and improved Travis too much, however, he sees a man holding her arm and is on the brink of charging over there with violence in mind before Shepley grabs him and points out that it’s one of the casino workers and if Travis goes off on one he’ll just get them all kicked out. Travis gets closer and hears the man tell Abby that it was good to see her again and that he’d see her tomorrow at five. It turns out that this is Abby’s former boyfriend; the one who wanted to be a youth minister, who is apparently now working at a Vegas casino instead. It seems Jesse (the former boyfriend) knows Abby is underage and is arranging to meet her tomorrow in return for letting her play till midnight without telling anyone.

Travis isn’t happy about this and Shep spells out to him that she can’t just go to another casino because they’d spot she’s underage and… apparently people here know her and let her get away with underage gambling? Despite it being highly illegal? Anyway, this brief conversation apparently takes up all the rest of the time until midnight, since next thing Trav and Shep are meeting the girls at their table.

So, it’s midnight, Jesse won’t let Abby play for any longer, and she still hasn’t won enough. Trav and Shepley offer her their winnings as well; apparently, in what was supposedly half an hour of playing blackjack to pass the time, the boys won $900 between them. Abby says that even with the money from the boys she’s still $5000 short, which would mean that in the few hours since she got here she’s won $8100 plus whatever four flights to Vegas and two rooms in a swish hotel cost. So, having made dangerous levels of alcohol abuse sound fun and sexy in this book aimed at people in their teens and twenties, McGuire is now making gambling sound like an easy way of earning money. Any other great messages you want to pass on to today’s youth, McGuire? Drug abuse is an exciting pastime, maybe?

Anyway, comes up and tells her he can’t give her any more time. Then he drops kisses on her hair and the corner of her mouth before leaving, so looks like he’s not planning for tomorrow’s dinner to be just an ‘old friends catching up’. Shep physically holds Travis back from attacking Jesse. Abby protests to Trav that she had to agree to have dinner with Jesse because the guy to whom her father owes money is Mob and is going to have her father killed if he can’t come up with the money:

‘Have you ever dealt with the Mob, Travis? I’m sorry if your feelings are hurt, but a free meal with an old friend isn’t a high price to pay to keep Mick alive.’

I’m open to correction on this one by any of the very many people who know more about the Mob than me, but would they actually kill someone for not paying off a debt on time? I would have thought it would be more along the lines of breaking some important bones and telling you you now had X further days to come up with the money before they came back to break more. Lather, rinse, repeat for as long as they think there’s any chance whatsoever of you coming up with any of the payment, which a dead debtor can’t do. Am I wrong?

Oh, well. It is fair to say that Abby would probably not be hugely comforted by the thought that her father is only in line for significant injury rather than actual death.  And I also realise that, while she would be entirely within her rights at this point to tell Mick to eff off and deal with the consequences of his own actions, that’s somewhat emotionally difficult when said consequences will involve maiming. So, yes, I can see how she actually would feel obliged to go along with Jesse’s demand for an evening out in order to keep him quiet.  I was going to say that nothing was stopping her from telling Jesse not to kiss her and/or introducing Travis as her boyfriend to make the situation clear, and then realised that actually she does still need to stay on Jesse’s good side at least until she’s collected her winnings and got out of there, since he could still blow her cover on being underage. So, since we seem to be ignoring the fact that this is all too illegal for the casino to pay out anyway, I suppose this bit of plot makes some sense.

America tells them they’ve got to get to Benny’s, and they head over there. I guess McGuire either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that you don’t get automatically handed the money as you win it; instead, you win piles of chips which you then have to cash in (with, once again, your ID getting carefully scrutinised to check for anyone who’s underage). I’m mildly amused by the image of them handing this mobster a pile of casino chips. Anyway, they walk to Benny’s house, which is nearby. The door is opened by a huge intimidating doorman. Apparently part of the intimidating aspect is his skin colour:

He was enormous – black, intimidating, and as wide as he was tall

Because apparently ‘black’ goes with ‘intimidating’ in McGuire’s mind.

Benny is also there, standing next to the doorman. Psychologically speaking, this seems like an odd choice; I would have thought his expected approach would have been to have the doorman keep them waiting with the tension building up before ushering them into the inner sanctum. Practically speaking, I can’t see how he’s supposed to be standing next to someone that huge without having to peek out from behind the doorjamb.

Anyway, Benny tells the others they need to wait outside and Travis insists he’s coming in, which Benny seems to respect. Trav makes sure he keeps himself between her and the doorman because he sees the doorman as ‘the biggest threat’. He’s not going to attack Abby randomly, Travis, and Benny’s not going to arrange any attacks at least until he gets his money.

Abby begs Benny to take the amount she’s got and give her tomorrow to get the rest. Benny correctly picks up on the fact that she’s doing this because she doesn’t think she can get the rest. They’d have done better to say ‘Here, take this now so that we’re not carrying $20,000 around Vegas at risk of any muggers’, which would have sounded more believable. Benny decides he’s going to arrange for his goons to attack Abby:

“I’m considering teaching Mick a lesson, and I’m curious just how lucky you are, kiddo.”

Travis has something to say about that:

“I hope you know, Benny, that when I take out your men, I mean no disrespect. But I’m in love with this girl, and I can’t let you hurt her.”

Nice. Gotta say, I like playing-it-cool Travis a whole lot better than gratuitously-violent Travis. Benny, by this point, is finding the whole thing amusing. He tells Travis what to expect fight-wise from each of his goons (one’s got a knife, the other’s never lost a fistfight). The goons attack, and, of course, Travis takes out both of them because he is Just That Good and apparently fighting his brothers as a child fully qualifies him to take out a best-of-the-best Mafia fighter.

Benny promptly sees an opportunity for a deal; if Travis takes Goon 2’s place in the fight he was meant to have the next day, which he’s now in no shape for, Benny will forgive Abby’s father the rest of the debt. Travis is totally up for this. They go out, meet Shep and America, and go back to the hotel where Travis showers off the blood and they get the other two caught up on events. America points out the obvious:

“This is ridiculous! Why are we helping Mick, Abby? He threw you to the wolves! I’m going to kill him!”

But Travis still wants to go ahead with the fight, having found that the one he’s just had was a superb outlet for his anger. He is, apparently, going to be fighting someone called Brock McMann, of whom both he and Shepley have heard:

“No way. No fucking way, Trav. The guy’s a maniac!”

Travis is fine with the plan as he’s doing it for Abby. Abby doesn’t want him to, but Trav retorts that he doesn’t want her going to dinner with her ex-boyfriend, so

“[…] I guess we both have to do something unpleasant to save your good-for-nothing father.”

And we’re at the end of another chapter. Nice to have some plot moving along finally, even if it did contain some pretty massive holes.

Walking Disaster, Chapter 19

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here.

This was initially a companion series to the magnificent Jenny Trout‘s review of the original novel, ‘Beautiful Disaster’. Jenny has since stopped her review, not wanting to give McGuire any further publicity in the wake of her attempts to run for office.

 

Chapter Nineteen: Daddy’s Home

Well, that sounds ominous.

Friday, the day of the date party, three days after Abby smiled about the new couch and then minutes later turned to whiskey over my tats.

That sentence took me a minute to decipher. As far as I can make out, it’s McGuire’s attempt to skip through some stuff from ‘Beautiful Disaster’ without having to go to the trouble of writing the scene, and either it hasn’t occurred to her that some of her readers won’t have read ‘Beautiful’ or she just didn’t care. The last chapter of ‘Walking Disaster’ did mention Travis buying a new couch (I forgot about his habit of having his five-minute stands on the old one and thus missed the fact that this was meant to be a New Start for the New Travis and skipped it), but I have no idea whether ‘turned to whiskey’ is meant to be some bizarre version of ‘turned to mush’ or whether it’s that she turned to drink over the stress of having Travis swear undying love to her in a gushy tattoo. Look, McGuire, if you want to write a different-POV version, write it; don’t just skip chunks when you get bored.

(five minutes later…)

Oooookaaaaay, just checked out the corresponding bit in ‘Beautiful Disaster’…

(several days later)

and have thus given myself a lot of extra stuff to type. Since the best answer to ‘Where do I start?’ seemed to be ‘By leaving this hot mess for another day; indeed, for many other days’, I went to bed.

Working through this:

1. Somewhat to my surprise, since it involves someone actually having an appropriate response, my latter explanation was correct and Abby did in fact turn to whiskey over the stress of Travis’s lovey-dovey tattoos. Not only does she recognise this is a bad idea when they’re so early in their relationship, she’s also worried over the fact he did this right after finding out who her father was and thus might be more interested in Mick Abernathy’s daughter than in Abby. Good for you, Abby!

2. Travis, unfortunately, is determined to brush Abby’s concerns aside. He also tries telling her that he was just passing by the tattoo place and decided to go in and get it done, which we flat-out know is a lie since we know from his conversation with Shepley last chapter that he planned this in advance.

3. For those curious about what the tats actually were; he got ‘Pigeon’ tattooed on his wrist (you know, the nickname he invented for Abby that she hated, so now she’s stuck with looking at it every time she sees his wrist), and ‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine’, (a line from the Song of Solomon in the Bible) tattooed along his ribs in Hebrew. The latter is the tattoo that he referred to in the last chapter of ‘Walking’ as ‘What I always said I would do if I met the right girl’. Uh, nice attempt at a retcon, McGuire, but I haven’t actually forgotten that back in Chapter Three he was insisting he wasn’t ever going to get that hung up on anyone, not to mention all that vile misogyny in the early chapters; I’m not buying this retcon of Trav as always having secretly been a romantic at heart. The romance in this gesture is, of course, also rather thoroughly negated by his determination to disregard Abby’s wishes or feelings in the matter, so, alas, I cannot get any warm mushy feels from it.

But alsooooo….

4. In the process of looking this up, I found that McGuire had once again left an entire chunk out of the story when writing up ‘Walking’. This involved Abby challenging Parker over the fact that he’d been trying to shit-stir between her & Travis with the openly declared intention of getting her to come back to him. Parker isn’t even embarrassed about that and just makes a slut-shamey joke about Abby clearly not being so shiny and new any more.

5. Oh, yes, and Abby and Trav are busy being the get-a-room couple in lectures, and after the showdown with Parker skip a lecture to screw in an empty lecture hall, and As Foretold By The Troutian Prophecy this is treated as all just so cuuuute and romantic.

Great. I started hoping I could get through this more quickly, and it’s taken me forever to get past the first sentence. Though I suppose that’s only because McGuire left so much stuff out, so if she’d put it all in then I’d probably have taken even longer over it, so small mercies.

Aaaaanyway, where the hell were we…

The girls were gone doing what girls do on the day of date parties

Because they’re girly girl girls whose actions all fall into the same category, obviously, because they’re giiiirrrrrrls. Travis, meanwhile, is really nervous about something and doesn’t know what, so he’s had a couple of drinks because apparently he hasn’t learned anything about maladaptive coping skills. (To be fair, he is a nineteen-year-old student so this bit’s realistic.) He’s also waiting on the steps in front of the apartment for Toto to do his business, so nice to know McGuire’s remembered Toto again. Toto produces, and Trav picks him up and goes back inside, so I guess scooping up the dog muck that has just been left right outside a (I assume) shared apartment building is not a thing Travis does. Lovely.

Travis spells out for us that he’s still anxious Without Apparent Cause:

The date party would be my first, yes, and I was going with my girlfriend for the first time, but the knot in my stomach was from something else. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. As if something terrible was lurking in the immediate future.

Y’know, I kind of like my foreshadowing without the anvil, but whatever.

Travis and Shepley have arranged for the apartment to be filled with bouquets for the girls, thus fitting the traditional toxic relationship pattern of making big grand romantic gestures without underlying healthy romantic patterns. As we see a few minutes later, when Travis complains again about Abby’s skirt being too short and her dress being too low-cut in the back. Though on this occasion she actually manages to persuade him to let her keep it on for the evening, so… that’s actually something.

They go to the party. Somebody called Brad Pierce notices Travis’s wrist tattoo:

“Dude, you got your girl’s name on your wrist? What in the hell possessed you to do that?” Brad said.

He doesn’t have Abby’s name on his wrist, he has the word ‘Pigeon’. Bit odd that Brad’s jumping straight to assuming it’s Abby’s name.

Travis and Abby dance. She tells him she’s hopelessly in love with him and he makes a speech that would indeed have been beautifully romantic if we hadn’t already seen all the toxicity.

After a few songs and one hostile, yet entertaining moment between Lexie and America

(sigh) All right, all right, I’ll bite… (back to copy of ‘Beautiful)

[Abby and Trav are groping each other while dancing]

“I guess we know what the appeal is,” Lexie sneered from behind us.

America spun, stomping toward Lexie on the warpath. Shepley grabbed her just in time.

“Say it again!” America said. “I dare you, bitch!”

Lexie cowered behind her boyfriend, shocked at America’s threat.

“Better get a muzzle on your date, Brad,” Travis warned.

One, thanks for that lovely bit of misogyny in the last line there. Two, anyone remember America’s ‘Vegas threw up on a flock of vultures’ sneer and how nobody seemed to object to that? But heaven forfend Lexie say that Abby and Trav’s attraction seems to be sexual. Can’t have anyone suggesting that perhaps their attraction is sexual even when they’re making it beyond obvious that it is.

Anyway, back to ‘Walking’. Trav and Abby go upstairs and out onto the balcony, where they catch Parker with his hand up a girl’s skirt. Parker gets his hand out quickly and they all do the awkward ‘so, how’ve you been?’ thing, and the girl (Amber, in case it ever comes up again) looks disgusted at meeting both of them because of course we have to establish that all other women except America are Abby’s enemies. Bleagh.

Anyway, Parker and Amber get out of there in a hurry and Abby and Travis stand there chatting, and Travis, referencing his new tattoo, says this:

“If it feels this good to have this on my arm, I can’t imagine how it’s going to feel to get a ring on your finger.”

“Travis…”

“In four, or maybe five years,” I said, inwardly cringing that I went that far.

To my genuine surprise, Abby actually responds sensibly to this.

Abby took a breath. “We need to slow down. Way, way down.”

“Don’t start this. Pidge.”

“If we keep going at this pace, I’m going to be barefoot and pregnant before I graduate. I’m not ready to move in with you, I’m not ready for a ring, and I’m certainly not ready to settle down.”

Excellent. Abby’s spotted what a bad idea it is to rush into assumptions about marriage at this point – even apart from Travis’s issues, they’re 19 and 20 and have only known each other a few months and are still in full on NRE! – and has set a clear-cut boundary about it.

So, of course Travis apologises for rushing and reassures her that he sees what she means and will back off and allow this to develop at a more sensible pace reacts like a pillock.

I gently cupped her shoulders. “This isn’t the ‘I wanna see other people’ speech, is it? Because I’m not sharing you. No fucking way.”

No, Travis, it’s the ‘You’re rushing far too fast and I’m setting some boundaries’ speech. Rather than respond to what Abby’s actually saying, you’re objecting to something she never said. This is an example of derailing. Oh, and strawmanning.

Abby insists she doesn’t want anyone else, and Travis asks her ‘What are you saying, then?’ because actually taking what she’s clearly saying at face value would obviously be too much to accept of him. Abby reiterates it, and at least Trav doesn’t try to strawman it this time, but he’s still not happy:

“It seems like we take one step forward and two steps back, Pidge.

No, Trav… you both took one step forward and then you tried to lunge about ten more steps forward without checking what she wanted and now you’re complaining because it turns out she doesn’t want to lunge forward with you.

Every time I think we’re on the same page, you put up a wall. I don’t get it … most girls are hounding their boyfriends to get serious, to talk about their feelings, to take the next step …”

“I thought we established that I’m not most girls?”

Because, as always, it’s vitally important to establish that Abby is Not Like Other Girls ™ and this is far more of a priority than questioning whether Travis is even right here. I mean, not that we have any reason to suspect that a raging misogynist whose contacts with women have consisted almost entirely of having quickies on the couch and then kicking them out might be wrong in his assumptions about what ‘most girls’ think, but I’m pretty sure there are plenty of nineteen-year-old college students of any gender who actually aren’t in a hurry to settle down permanently with one person.

Also, I’m now picturing Abby putting up a wall on a page, and thus have images of one of those 3D pop-up books.

Anyway, Trav asks where she sees this going and Abby says that when she thinks about her future she sees him, which is enough to placate him. They stand there and share a pleasant moment which is interrupted by America bursting in to warn Abby that her father now knows where she is. It seems he kept pestering Abby’s mother, who wouldn’t tell him, and he eventually got the idea of phoning America’s family, whereupon America’s father decided that he had ‘a right’ to know and told him. Many thumbs down for America’s father. Do not do this, people. If someone’s hiding from a family member there’s probably a very good reason why.

Abby panics at the idea of her father turning up. Travis promises to protect her. Abby runs out, desperate to get away from the party.

I had only heard about Mick Abernathy’s accolades as a poker player from my father. Watching Abby run like a frightened little girl made me hate any time my family wasted being in awe of him.

And thus I am actually in the rare position of approving wholeheartedly of something Travis thinks. Despite having grown up hearing about how awesome this guy is, when he sees how upset Abby is over this he does a 180o on the subject straight away. No ‘but he can’t be that bad!’, no ‘surely you should give him a chance…’ no ‘but what a cool poker player he is!’; just straight into believing and accepting Abby’s word on the matter. I honestly think this is the first time Travis has done something I actively like.

Anyway, as they’re charging out, America spots Mick Abernathy, who is described as ‘an older, slovenly man, unshaven and dirty to the point where he looked like he smelled’. He’s showing a photo to a group of people who are nodding at it, so the implication apparently is that he’s looking for Abby and they’re confirming that she was at the party.

Abby promptly changes tack on the whole trying-to-avoid-him thing and instead storms up to him to ask what he’s doing there and tell him to get out. The answer to the first question is, apparently, that he’s trying to hit her up for money. Despite that, the first thing he says to her, while looking at her dress and making disapproving noises, is “Well, well, Cookie. You can take the girl out of Vegas – ” Am I reading that wrong or did he just start out by slut-shaming the person he’s about to ask for a colossal favour?

It transpires that Mick owes $25,000 to someone called Benny, who is apparently the sort of person you really don’t want to be in debt to if you want to keep all your limbs, and he’s come to get the money from his teenage daughter, because, hey, let’s stay classy… and he can’t even manage to be polite to her or her boyfriend while he’s doing this:

Mick’s eyes rolled over me, from my face to my shoes. “Who’s this clown?”

To which Travis responds with ‘I can see, now, why a smart guy like yourself has been reduced to asking your teenage daughter for an allowance’, thus doubling the occasions so far in this book in which I have liked something he’s done. Travis, you are on a roll here; keep up the good work.

Abby admits to having $11,000, which she apparently made by betting on Travis’s fights. When? She went to one fight that we heard about. I looked back and Travis mentioned having a couple more fights in the time Abby was staying at the apartment for the bet, so she could have bet on those. Since Travis is supposedly superb at fighting, the odds on him wouldn’t give her a huge return for each sum of money she bet. To make $11,000 in three fights, wouldn’t she have had to have massive amounts of stake money to start with? Also, how much is Adam taking in entry fees in order to be able to take bets with that kind of likely payout?

Anyway, Mick reckons she’ll be able to double that in a weekend (by playing poker, I assume), and thus bail him out. Abby makes the mistake of trying to argue a rearguard action instead of just giving him a hard no:

“It’ll clean me out, Mick. I have to pay for school,” Abby said, a tinge of sadness in her voice.

“Oh, you can make it back in no time,” he said, waving his hand dismissively.

Father of the year, clearly. On the plus side, it makes a very nice change for the slimeball to be the designated slimeball rather than the designated love interest.

Travis continues his run of actual likeability by pointing out to Abby that she doesn’t have to give him anything. Mick tries some shitty guilt trip about how it’s the least Abby can do because, supposedly, he wouldn’t be in this mess if not for her:

America slapped his hand away and then shoved him. “Don’t you dare start that shit again, Mick! She didn’t make you borrow money from Benny!”

Mick glared at Abby. The light of hatred in his eyes made any connection with her as his daughter disappear. “If it weren’t for her, I woulda had my own money. You took everything from me, Abby. I have nothin’!”

Abby tells him she’ll get him the money by Sunday, but this is the last time; from now on, he’s to stay away from her. Yup, I’m sure he’ll listen to that the next time he’s got himself in too deep with the wrong people. They head to the car, and:

America sighed. “Pack your bags, boys. We’re going to Vegas.” She walked toward the Charger, and Shepley and I stood, frozen.

“Wait. What?” He looked to me. “Like Las Vegas, Vegas? As in Nevada?”

(I now want someone to say ‘As in the ‘threw up on a flock of vultures’ analogy from the first time you all went to the Red together.‘ Sadly, no-one does.)

“Looks that way,” I said, shoving my hands in my pockets.

“We’re just going to book a flight to Vegas,” Shepley said, still trying to process the situation.

“Yep.”

So, they get in the car ready to make tracks for Vegas, the implication being that Abby’s going to try to win the money playing poker. I predict that this plan will work perfectly well and make her look even sexier to Travis into the bargain, because McGuire does not care what lessons she gives young people about sensible behaviour. Wait, no; the next chapter is called ‘You Win Some, You Lose Some’, so maybe Abby’ll just lose all her money. Anyway, chapter ends.

A New Year’s Update

As people might or might not have noticed, I’ve barely been around for the past several months. I’m pleased to say that there is a positive reason for this; after almost a decade of knowing the marriage was over, and thanks to a great deal of financial and practical support from my mother, I have finally been in a practical position to leave my husband. So, we are currently separated and I hope to sort out the divorce in the coming year.

We split up over what might be called irreconcilable differences. The difference in this case was that he thought it was all right to be constantly critical of me and regularly blow up over little things, and I didn’t. As differences go, that one is pretty irreconcilable. For various practical reasons there was a huge delay between me realising that the marriage was over in all but name and actually being able to leave. This was not a good situation, but not as bad as you might be imagining, as a) I knew I would find a way to get out eventually and b) about half way through the decade of time that all this took up, I finally hit the point where things were bad enough that I was ready to get the hell out of there absolutely regardless of what it took and what the practical difficulties were and, what do you know, when I told him I was going to leave him it suddenly turned out that actually he could bring himself to make long-term changes in the way he treated me. How ’bout that. After that, the marriage was bearable enough for me to stay for the remaining years until the situation with our children was such that I was in a better position to leave.

Anyway, this August I managed it. I’m living in rented accommodation for the time being, with our younger child (now 17); my husband is still in our house with the 20-year-old. The eventual plan is to put our house on the market after quite a bit of prepatory work has been done and to buy separate places with the proceeds. There is still a tremendous amount to sort out both literally and metaphorically, but I’m ending this year in a much better place (also both literally and metaphorically) than that in which I started it, and I feel that, whatever else I have or haven’t done, I’ve accomplished the most important thing I had to do this year.

Quite open to questions if anyone has any. Either way, I wish you all an upcoming year of positive things, even in the face of all the odds.

LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back

This post is part of a blogging protest arranged by Julia Serano, in response to not only Republican transphobia but – horribly – Democrat enablement and caving to the bullies. More details at the link, but the short version is that 1. a trans woman has just been elected as the first transgender member of Congress, 2. a Republican Congresswoman who apparently isn’t interested in spending her time doing the actual job she was elected to do has instead devoted herself to posting unbelievable numbers of transphobic tweets and trying to bar this woman from the women’s bathrooms, and 3. most of the Democrats just seem to be… nodding their heads and OK-ing this?

(Sorry; this stuff is so freaking depressing I can’t even face looking up the names of the people concerned right now. I just want to get this post up before the deadline.)

Anyway, Serano’s suggestion is that today – Tuesday, 3rd December – as many people as possible use their blogs, podcasts, or what have you to put up a post with the above title speaking out against transphobia and homophobia. (Yes, that’s why a bunch of posts with the same title are showing up on the FTB menu right now.) Trans people, cis people, gay people, straight people. Anyone who finds this bigotry disgusting.

I’m going to have to keep this brief – even with time zones on my side, I’ve not got much time to get this up for the deadline – so please excuse the fact that this really isn’t going to be one of my most clearly written posts. I’m writing this because I have this shouldn’t-really-be-radical idea that people deserve respect and dignity and fair treatment regardless of sexuality or gender identity, and it seems that’s not going to happen without people being willing to speak out.

For my views on the whole transphobia-fuelled bathroom controversy, I refer you to the post I wrote on the topic back when Rowling came out as full-on transphobe. (I might add that in this case it’s reached a whole new level of egregiousness; the Republicans here aren’t even falling back on the hypothetical ‘but what if an abuser pretended to be a woman to get into the women’s toilets?’ but are attacking a specific person just for trying to use the bathroom while transgender and are doing so within a month of having voted a known sex abuser who has invaded women’s bathrooms for abuse purposes in as President. I mean, it really could not be more obvious that this is really all about ‘let’s point and sneer at the trans person’.

Anyway… this whole blogging action is meant to be directed at Democrat politicians who think it’s OK to back away from supporting a very vulnerable group who are facing horrendous attacks on their rights (not to mention, in many cases, physical attacks on themselves) Or, worse, not just to back away but to agree with the bigots. And I’m actually drawing a blank on what to say, because I feel that anyone who doesn’t already realise that this is a fundamentally shitty thing to do is probably not going to be convinced by anything I could say on the matter.

So, instead, I’m going to make a practical point: This isn’t even a good political strategy. The people who voted against you because of transphobia did so as part of an entire package of Libs Are Evil, and aren’t going to change their mind because you say a few transphobic things yourself. The ones who voted against you because of the economy don’t care. Politically speaking, transphobia just isn’t that much of a winner. Throwing trans people under the bus isn’t even going to get you that many voters in exchange for your souls.

I’ll leave Pastor Niemoller with the last word.

Growing up feminist, and associated rambling

“I’m sorry if I ruined your childhood by being too feminist” my mother greeted me contritely when I phoned her for the weekly call.

“Huh? I’m glad you brought me up as a feminist,” I assured her. My mother does sometimes have random bursts of remorse about this and that, so it took me a moment to make the connection; while I hadn’t yet read it, I’d seen that my sister had just put up another post, and I now realised it must be one of the ones in which Ruth wrote about childhood experiences.

(Shameless plug: My sister is the author Ruth Whippman and her substack is I Blame Society. Do check her out; in my of course entirely unbiased view, she’s an excellent and thought-provoking writer.)

Boyhood: The Shark Experience turned out to be about the dilemma of parenting while ideologically committed; to what extent do you get to make your children your political project? Sure enough, part of it was Ruth’s description of growing up as the daughter of a second-wave feminist who banned anything that was too conventionally ‘girly’. And so, again, I settled down to read about my childhood as seen through the eyes of the other person who shared it.

The childhood bans on conventional femininity had never bothered me in the slightest, since I had no interest in make-up or Barbie accessories and never noticed what I was wearing enough to care whether it was pink or not. (The ban on learning to touch type could have been more of a practical problem – that one didn’t age well – but, as it happened, I thought touch-typing looked like such a cool skill that when I found a library book promising to teach me how to do it within five days I went ahead with learning, and my mother accepted that on the grounds that I kept it to myself. “If they know you can touch-type,” she told me darkly, not specifying the ‘they’, “they’ll try to push you into being a secretary.” I successfully avoided this fate and instead entered general practice at just the time it was moving to full computerisation and thus saved oceans of time over the next few decades by my ability to type up my consultation notes quickly and accurately, not to mention the later ease of blogging, so this is the point on which I’m most glad to have ignored my mother’s advice.)

However, Ruth was interested in all those things, and suffered from their lack to an extent I had not fully appreciated. As she put it, ‘I spent most of the early eighties in a unisex playsuit with a bizarrely unflattering short haircut, craving objectification.’ (If it’s any consolation, I think all the other children on our street looked fairly similar. But perhaps that’s just the effect of the orange-tinted old photos.) Since then, she’s grown up to be a feminist who loves buying clothes/high heels to an extent which she attributes to childhood lack:

The ladies who sniggered and called feminists “women’s libbers” were gleeful when they saw me craving pink or sparkles.  “You see!” they gloated, “it’s natural for girls to want this! If you deprive them, they’ll only want it more!”  […] In one sense, the sneerers were right. The childhood lack did make me crave these things in adulthood.

Did it? I’m honestly curious about what is, to a large extent, an unanswerable question; would Ruth have grown up less interested in ‘feminine’ clothes if she’d had more of them at an early age, or are our interests more innate than that? After all, what Ruth didn’t mention here is the years in which she got boxloads of pretty clothes courtesy of a friend of our grandmother who had a granddaughter slightly older than Ruth was with a mother who, apparently, loved buying stylish and attractive clothes for her daughter. (To this day, the girl’s name – Mary Hall – resonates with me as if it were the name of a famous designer, just because the phrase ‘the Mary Hall clothes’ was so often uttered in tones of awe and delight in our house.) This seems like it should have mitigated earlier childhood femininity-deprivation, so I suspect that Ruth’s adult love of clothes and shoes doesn’t really trace back to the previous lack of them, however neat a story that might make for the ‘You SEE? You did it WRONG’ school of anti-feminists/parenting critics.

Meanwhile, what effect did this particular variety of feminist childhood have on me?

I did retain an automatic long-term avoidance of pink, which might actually be kind of a shame since objectively speaking it looks good on me. I still don’t use make-up, which has saved me quite a bit of time over the years. But the main long-term impact wasn’t from anything I was or wasn’t allowed to have as a child. It was from the fact that my parents – in the 70s, no less! – managed to have a genuinely egalitarian marriage and to make this look as natural as breathing.

The actual task breakdown wasn’t 50:50; my father was perfectly capable of getting meals on the table and did so, but my mother was a culinary artist and in any case, feminism or not, did have a deep-rooted desire to nurture her family that manifested in doing significantly more of the cooking. Meanwhile, she had no idea how to manage any sort of DIY or electricity-related jobs, so those fell to my father. That had an effect on me as well; I have a clear memory of noticing, age 17, that a fuse in a plug had gone and automatically thinking that I must get Dad to do it… and then catching myself and realising that I was half way through a physics A-level course and entirely capable of changing my own plugs. But the fact that I could realise that still stemmed from a solid background of growing up with jobs that were for both genders. I grew up in a household in which it was taken for granted that both parents would have careers and that both of them would share the work of keeping the meals coming and the house in order.

Because our parents took this for granted, or at least behaved as if they did I grew up doing the same thing. I accepted without question their assumptions that I would use my science-leaning academic abilities to get into a good career, and that I would someday find a partner who would, as a decent person, accept the need to share in household tasks. And, while it’s hardly unusual to have a life littered with the ghosts of childhood assumptions that didn’t survive adult life, in my case I did indeed end up in a career I love and in a marriage that, while it has significant other problems, does on the whole involve us each doing a fair share of cooking and household tasks. That’s my parents’ legacy to me, and also to my sister, and I think I can speak for us both when I say how deeply I appreciate it.

Walking Disaster, Chapter 18

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here.

This was initially a companion series to the magnificent Jenny Trout‘s review of the original novel, ‘Beautiful Disaster’. Jenny has since stopped her review, not wanting to give McGuire any further publicity in the wake of her attempts to run for office.

 

Chapter 18: Lucky Thirteen

My word, it has been a while. I had to look back to find out what had been happening in the book at the point where I was last reviewing it (it involved Abby standing up to Trav and calling him out, so that actually managed to be briefly enjoyable). Let’s see…

Travis is taking Abby home to meet the family. The place reeks of everybody smoking and of ancient carpet, and one of Abby’s brothers calls Travis an asshat the minute he’s through the door (to be fair, I cannot actually disagree…) but Trav is confident Abby’s going to love his family anyway.

There’s a bit about how Thomas has made it his job for years to ‘calm potential storms’ in the family by being ‘always on the lookout for someone that could potentially rock our already rickety boat’, because they all recognise that ‘Dad can’t take it’ if there are problems. So, major dysfunction and parentification going on there.

Trenton eyes up Abby and gets slapped on the back of the head by his father for it. Abby, meanwhile, recognises someone called Stu Ungar from a photo. (Famous poker player, in case anyone else was wondering, but I had to look that up because McGuire doesn’t really explain it. Is he famous enough in the US that McGuire could reasonably have assumed her readers would have heard of him?) This scores her major points with the family, who are about to launch straight into a poker game, including Travis. Great welcome for a guest there; if Abby hadn’t been a poker fan, she’d have been left twiddling her thumbs through multiple games. (This scene could have been rather better done if the mention of Stu Ungar had led to the boys finding out that Abby loves poker and asking if she wants a game, rather than clearly being about to launch into one regardless.)

Fortunately, it turns out that Abby’s brilliant at poker and wipes the floor with them all. Thomas then recognises her surname and puts it together… Abby is the daughter of Mick Abernathy, a poker legend. This makes her an out-and-out celebrity in the family’s eyes, and they go wild for her. We now get our title grab; it’s a press nickname of Abby’s. Apparently her father gave an interview saying that his luck ‘ran dry’ at midnight on her thirteenth birthday and hers picked up instead. And she grew up playing poker with her father’s friends, who were mobsters.

Abby is looking mortified by all this and Travis and family think she’s the best thing since sliced bread. Travis finds this so hot he makes excuses to his family and heads home with her straight away, where he finds out Abby’s worried she’s mad at her for not telling him. When she finds out he’s actually starstruck, she’s not much happier with that; she left Kansas to get away from being Mick Abernathy’s daughter, which sucked for her. Travis actually does the decent thing for once and promises her he won’t mention it again and won’t tell anyone else.

Later, after Abby’s asleep, Travis gets texted by ‘Jason Brazil’. That clears something up; ‘Brazil’ is clearly his surname, not his first name, so at least that’s less improbable than having two characters with unusual country first names. I do wonder in passing whether that fact gets a mention in ‘Beautiful’, or McGuire put it in only after everyone pointed out to her how unlikely it would be to have a Brazil and an America in the same friend group. Anyway, Brazil is texting to tell Trav that Parker is ‘talkin smack’ about him. Apparently Abby is still calling him and Parker is waiting in the wings to get his chance when Trav screws up… oh, great, sounds like Parker’s going full-on Nice Guy. Brazil also tells Trav:

Sd just now that she told him the other day she was really unhappy but u were kinda crazy and she was worried about when to do it.

Trav, being Trav, immediately jumps straight to wanting to wreck Parker’s car, rather than wanting to speak to Abby and find out whethr she is unhappy and whether there’s anything he can do to make her feel more comfortable. However, he at least manages to keep this under control, so… some character growth has happened! Yay, McGuire! Shepley spots this as well, the next day; he thinks Parker planned this to wind Trav up to send him into a jealous rage that would convince Abby to break up with him. (Sadly plausible.)

Trav then tells Shepley he’s on his way to get a new tattoo, and…

“What are you doing, Trav?”

“What I always said I would do if I met the right girl.”

So it sounds like he’s about to go get the sort of Abs-&-Trav-4-evah tattoo that everyone tells you it’s a terrible idea to get when you’ve just started going out with the person. Shepley tries to talk Trav out of this in case it freaks Abby out, and Trav not only refuses to listen, he tells Shepley he’s going to the jeweller’s store next, to ‘have it. For when the time is right.’ So apparently he’s planning to buy Abby an engagement ring to have at the ready. When he’s nineteen, she’s eighteen, and they’ve only known each other for what seems to be a few months, although in McGuire Time it’s difficult to tell.

Shepley tries talking some sense:

“No time anytime soon is right. I am so in love with America that it drives me crazy sometimes, but we’re not old enough for that shit, yet, Travis. And . . .  what if she says no?”

And, of course, Travis has no intention of listening; he’s on his way to get that tattoo and buy that ring. I’m going to hazard a guess that Abby will, in fact, see all this as super-romantic and not a red flag at all, but we do not find out at this point as the chapter ends here. Huh; that means I actually made it through a chapter review in fairly short order. Amazing what you can do when the dysfunction reduces. Maybe the rest of the book will be like this and I can whiz through it? I’m a completionist and do want to finish it, but I don’t want to devote my life to it. We shall see.

‘The Lost Child’, Anne Atkins: review, Part Six

This is the last of a multi-part series reviewing the 1994 anti-abortion novel ‘The Lost Child’, in which protagonist Caz reacts to her mother’s abortion by constructing an elaborate lifelong fantasy about the younger sister she imagines she would have had. Part One is here and contains links to all the other parts.

At this point in the book, Caz has finished writing and publishing her book, in between a rapid and intense romance with her next-door neighbour Will, to whom she is now engaged.

Content warning: Talk of child death, life support cessation decisions, ablism (though this is presented as wrong in-story), inappropriate pressure from the medical profession, description of callous treatment of a body after death, and suicide plans.

 

The highbrow despair

Having ended the previous chapter (the conclusion of the book-within-a-book) on a positive note, with Caz looking forward to the future, Atkins starts this one with Caz in the depths of despair. In a very highbrow literary way, to the point where she actually lampshades it; ‘Oh, Caz, can’t you even watch your heart break without quoting effing literature?’ she writes after quoting Macbeth and rambling about how Laurence Olivier managed to howl effectively on stage when required by learning it from trapped minks.

The next several pages are Caz a) lamenting how awful she feels and b) telling the Greek myth of Cassandra because Atkins wants this for symbolic purposes which I’ll get to shortly. One slightly odd thing here (which will be relevant in a few minutes, so bear with me) is that Caz claims that, as part of the curse, Cassandra knows her prophecies will be believed just once in her life, on the day that she dies.  This would be a brilliantly effective addition to the curse (imagine not only never being believed, but knowing that when it eventually happens it won’t be a relief as it’ll be a sign of your own imminent death), but it isn’t one that I can find in any version online, nor could I find anyone who’d heard of it when I asked on Reddit. I’m not sure whether Atkins took liberties with the story deliberately, whether she actually had heard this version somewhere herself, or whether she simply got it wrong.

Anyway, we eventually find out what all this is about; her lover Will has finally told her the full story of his child’s death, and it turns out that he gave the doctors permission to turn off the life-support machine, which Caz finds unacceptable.

Will’s story (as told by Caz)

Late in her pregnancy, Will’s wife was hospitalised and unconscious with severe pneumonia. The baby was delivered by emergency Caesarean and put on a life-support machine. The next day, the paediatric team came to Will (his wife was still unconscious) and told him that ‘there was a considerable possibility of brain-damage to a greater or lesser extent’. We’re not told what sort of level of brain damage the doctors were suspecting here, but Caz implies that it’s on the level of ‘won’t get qualifications or go to university’. The consultant’s response to this level of uncertainty was…

Their medical opinion was that the continuance of life-support for the foetus was strongly contra-indicated.

As before, Atkins apparently doesn’t know that ‘foetus’ is a term specifically used for the stages of development prior to birth and thus no-one would have been referring to a child after birth by this term. However, that’s far from being the worst plausibility problem with this story. We’re told that the consultant not only recommended switching off the life-support machine, he wanted a fairly quick answer from Will about this because…

[…] as there was no knowing how long the machine would be needed … well, suffice it to say that Will would have to make up his mind while there was still the choice.

… and so the consultant was going to come back to Will at the end of the ward round, forty-five minutes later, and get his answer then, the clear implication thus being that this was framed as ‘switch off the life support right then or risk being saddled with a brain-damaged child which will, of course, be too awful a prospect for you to even consider it as a possible option’.

Aaaaand no, Atkins, that is not how decisions about switching off ventilators are made in real life.

There are rare and tragic cases where brain damage is so severe and the predicted quality of life so poor or non-existent that doctors will advise that life support be turned off. Typically, in such cases, the medical staff will do everything they can to be sure that the prognosis really is that bad. They will sit the parents down for a sensitive conversation about it. They will give them time to think about it. And, above all, they won’t make the suggestion in the first place unless they’re sure that the prognosis really is hopelessly dire.

This idea that a consultant would railroad a parent into making this sort of decision about a child who was already showing enough signs of improvement that they anticipated her shortly being able to breathe independently is just so far away from the reality of these sorts of situations that I’m flabbergasted that Atkins had the brass neck to write this. This is deeply insulting to all the doctors who’ve had to guide parents through these horrible decisions with sensitivity and professionalism. While I disagree with Atkins’ views on abortion, at least with abortion she’s objecting to something that actually happens and not to some strawman she’s invented.

Oh; we also get told a few pages later that the baby’s body was thrown out with hospital trash after death. Again, no. I get that Atkins is probably trying to make some sort of point about how much she disapproves of fetuses being treated this way after abortion or miscarriage, but that isn’t what happens when children die after birth. (For that matter, it’s also not what happens with stillbirths after viability or even with late miscarriages.) Both parents would have been given a chance to hold and say goodbye to their child and then a chance to plan a funeral and choose either burial or cremation. Atkins is arguing against a strawman.

Caz’s reaction

So, Caz has told us this heart-wrenching story of Will, left alone and without guidance under this sort of pressure while his wife is still unconscious. She tells us about how he desperately tries to get through to someone he trusts with whom he can discuss this horrible decision, and can’t manage it within the short time he’s been given, and how he prays for an answer and doesn’t get one, and eventually, after forty horrible minutes of this, tells the doctors that he’ll ‘be ruled by them’, because he just can’t think of any other way to make the decision. Regardless of what you think of the rightness or wrongness of the decision itself, it’s very hard to read this without your heart going out to anyone faced with such a horrible situation and so little support.

Well, except apparently for Caz. She writes in her diary that he ‘murdered his child’ and that he ‘must be a monster’ who ‘destroys everything I’ve ever lived for’. That’s the level of compassion she’s able to show for the man she supposedly loves so much.

And that’s completely in line with the way Atkins has written her character. So far, through the book, we’ve seen a judgemental woman with rigid views on right or wrong, whose main relationship has been with an imaginary person she can idealise, who doesn’t seem able to extend sympathy or grace to the flaws of real people, and who doesn’t even seem to understand the concept of being able to sympathise with a decision with which she disagrees. Meanwhile, she’s seen no problems with making a decision to marry her first serious partner only a few months after meeting him, while still in full-on NRE stage.

With that background, it feels very realistic that she has this kind of 180o reaction to finding out something about Will of which she disapproves. She doesn’t seem to have any kind of framework for accepting and forgiving someone who has done anything with which she disagrees, however long ago and however deeply regretted. And, now that she can no longer idealise Will (the way she idealised her imaginary sister), everything has crashed down for her.

But I don’t get any sense that this characterisation was deliberate on Atkins’ part. It could, in fact, have worked really well to present Caz deliberately as a flawed protagonist and unreliable narrator. But Atkins is trying to present her as Cassandra the ignored prophetess, the truth-speaker we should all believe. Atkins is on Caz’s side here.

Having given this scene a lot more thought than it actually deserves, I’ve eventually realised that Atkins is clumsily trying to make some point about non-Christians supposedly being unable to forgive:

So what do I do? I honestly don’t think I know anyone who’d understand. I once knew a man [her grandfather] who would have done. But then he had a future and a city with a crystal river to look forward to, where the sun never sets. He would have known what to do. But this, all this futility, wasn’t the end for him.

I don’t have his future or his faith, and my point of reference isn’t the Bible but the classics – which he understood well enough too – so I’ll have to look for my answers there.

So it seems Atkins thinks nonbelievers are incapable of forgiveness. At the same time, she seems to have no concept of reacting to a disagreement by thinking about the person’s reasons for acting the way they did and/or their feelings about it now and whether they regretted it and forgiving others in that way. In other words, she doesn’t really seem to understand forgiveness at all. I’m left with the impression that she sees forgiveness as ticking off a mental ‘there, forgiven’ box rather than actually trying to understand anything about the other person’s viewpoint or actions.

Atkins does not seem to see anything wrong with Caz’s lack of any such attempt to understand. As far as I can see, the only problem Atkins has with Caz’s reaction seems to be that she isn’t able to tick the mental ‘there, forgiven’ box which (in Atkins’ eyes) a Christian would be able to make everything all right by ticking. Other than that, Atkins seems to see this harshness and lack of compromise as completely justified. If this is how Atkins really feels about the matter, then that tells us quite a lot about her.

And just when you thought this was bad enough… (further content warning)

Caz, having broken up with Will because of a decision he made years ago under great pressure and clearly deeply regrets, feels she also can’t face living without Will. So, her reaction is to start planning her own suicide.

She doesn’t go through with it; after a few days of relating her despair at great length (and, to be fair, with beautifully written vivid description; Atkins is good at the wordsmithery part of writing), she posts a more positive diary entry which is all very vague but does effectively imply that she’s going to go and make it up with Will. On top of which, she is apparently a major character in Atkins’ next novel, and, from the look-inside feature on Amazon, it seems she is back with Will, so clearly that’s what happened. But we do get these few days in which, although she never specifically says in so many words that she’s planning to kill herself, she makes it very clear that that’s what she’s thinking.

Now, I’m trying to think how to say this next bit, because I do not want either to minimise the horrendous pain that leads so many people to take their own lives or to make assumptions about what anyone does or doesn’t feel they have to live for. I know that people whose lives seem wonderful on the surface can have unsuspected torments beneath that surface. I know that depression is a tricksy lying weasel that can convince someone that their life is hopeless even when it seems objectively good. So please, please, do not take my next comments as being any sort of judgement on the real people who are faced with real problems that drive them to suicide, and please, if anyone reading this feels that way themselves, know that I believe in your pain and hope for you that you have people who will take it seriously and help you.

But here is the problem with Atkins’ portrayal: We’ve been reading Caz’s diary all along, so we know that she doesn’t have that level of problems. This isn’t a case of someone who seems fine on the surface while feeling terrible underneath. This is someone who has not been suffering from depression, who has not been struggling with hidden problems, whose life has by her own account been going splendidly up until the point where she chose to break up with her fiancé purely because she is too rigid and lacking in compassion to accept that he once, long ago, did something she believes to be wrong. And the result of writing Caz as planning suicide solely for that reason is that what would otherwise have been a genuinely excellently written portrayal of someone struggling with despair comes across more as a teenager having an ‘I shall DIE and THEN they’ll all be sorry!’ strop.

On top of which, we get this:

Cassandra died the moment she’d been believed; with the truth, as always, on her lips.

…which Caz ties in to the fact that she got such good reviews of the advance copy of her book:

My book has been hailed as prophetic, the catalyst to change the law. ‘The tide of morality is turning (I quote) and soon the law will protect the unborn child again, as it has throughout most of history until 1967.’

Oh, yes, they believe me now.

They believe me now.

So, Atkins is trying to draw a parallel between Caz’s planned suicide and Cassandra’s death, with both of them presented as the prophets who die only at the point where people finally believe them. I’m sure she meant this to be powerful and symbolic, but it doesn’t stand up well.

Firstly, Caz isn’t making a prophecy; she’s expressing an opinion. So people aren’t disbelieving her, they’re disagreeing with her. There’s a difference, although Atkins doesn’t seem to get that.

Secondly, the reason Cassandra’s realisation of her upcoming death was a tragedy was the inevitability of what she predicts. She knows that she’ll die later that day and she knows that there is absolutely nothing she can do to prevent it. Caz, on the other hand, is making a choice. She has the options of either facing the grief and learning to make a life without Will, or being less unbendingly rigid in her requirements for the people in her life, forgiving him, and taking him back. However much she might dislike the idea of either of those choices, they still exist.

The result of all this is that her comparison of herself with Cassandra comes across as not so much powerful as grandiose. (It also occurs to me that it is really quite rich for Caz to be comparing herself to someone who had ‘the truth, as always, on her lips’ when she has in fact spent years lying to her publishers.)

However. We are not done yet; there is still a layer of hypocrisy icing on this particular intolerance cake. Because we now find out…

Will and I are having a child.

This, by the way, is written on August 26th. Caz also says it’s a boy, so she’s supposedly far enough along to have had some sort of test for (apparent) gender. Caz and Will met on the first of May and became lovers some time in the middle of June. If Caz is not only pregnant but far enough along to have had a gender check, she must have conceived almost as soon as they started going to bed together, which was only about a month and a half after they met. That is… not a good timescale for making decisions about creating a new person for whom the two of you will be forever jointly responsible.

However, setting that aside; Caz, ferocious defender of fetal life, is pregnant. And considering suicide. So, surely, according to her own beliefs she should be planning on postponing her suicide until the baby is born? Nope. We’re back to the Greek mythology-based symbolism:

Procne took her beloved son, her Itylus, and killed him out of vengeance for her sister.

[…]

Will and I are having a child. A boy. Our Itylus.

…so Caz’s plan is, apparently, to commit suicide while she is pregnant and to view this as some kind of symbolic vengeance against Will in a gospel-according-to-Greek-mythology way.

And she’s planning this despite the fact that her defining character trait throughout the book has been her utter opposition to abortion, which she firmly believes to be child murder. Despite her protest in the end of her book, written only weeks ago, about how having to live through ‘a few short months’ of unwanted pregnancy shouldn’t outweigh a child’s right to life. Despite her childhood vow ‘never to kill my children, I mean a baby in my tummy’. Despite the fact that the entire reason she’s upset in the first place is because she’s angry at Will for what she believes to be child murder on his part. The hypocrisy is utterly breathtaking.

And it could still have worked in-story if called out. After Caz’s eventual decision not to commit suicide after all, she could have had a scene of looking back with horror at how nearly she had done something she found abhorrent. It could have been a learning moment in which she realised for the first time what it was like to be desperate enough to get to that point. She wouldn’t even have needed to change her views on abortion; just find the understanding and compassion that has been so missing from her character until now, maybe look back at her mother’s decision with new insight and sympathy. But we don’t get any of that.

The outcome, and final thoughts

After several entries in which Caz despairs of ever feeling happy again (and also some letters, including one from Caz to her niece for her sixth birthday in which she sends her the story she once wrote of Procne and Philomela, because of course that’s a totally appropriate present to send to a six-year-old, especially when you’re planning to commit suicide knowing what a traumatic event that will be for her), we get a final entry in which Caz seems to have found her way back to inner peace and a wish to go on living. And, again, the wordsmithery part of the writing here is very good. Caz goes out to look at the Thames and we get shown-not-told that she’s focusing on more positive imagery, in ways that are very nicely bookended with the negative images she was writing about back in the novel’s opening pages. The final line, in a callback to a pleading letter Will wrote Caz a few days earlier in which he told her he’d get a bottle of Moet and wait for her, is:

Well, I thought as I turned away, who ever said you couldn’t have Moet for breakfast?’

So, without being explicitly told that Caz has decided to try again with Will, we can still pick it up from that line. In these ways, this chapter is good writing.

The problem with it, however, is that we’re given no indication of how Caz got mentally from Point A to Point B. In real life it is of course fairly normal for a few days of letting the dust settle to be enough for people to find they’ve moved quite naturally from ‘LET’S CALL THE WHOLE THING OFF’ to ‘Potayto, potahto, whatever’; not every argument needs a big definitive resolution. But, when you’ve gone to the trouble of throwing a nuclear-level disagreement in as a plot twist forty pages from the end of your novel, you need to actually address it in some way, not just let it peter out vaguely into nothingness.

Caz could have realised that, while she still disagreed with what Will had done, she could nevertheless feel empathy for him and forgive him. Even better, she could have come to the obvious realisation about her own hypocrisy in planning suicide while she was still pregnant and could have learned the more general lesson of ‘people can make decisions they deeply regret later, especially in acutely stressful circumstances, while still being basically good people’ and extrapolated that to understanding and forgiving Will. But we don’t see any of that. We just go from Caz being all ready to commit suicide to make a point, to Caz waking up feeling a bit better, to Caz apparently feeling positive about life again and being about to go back to Will. So, as plot resolutions go, it’s a damp squib.

However, good or bad (I’m voting ‘indifferent’), it is the end of the book. As I mentioned, Caz does show up in a subsequent Atkins novel titled ‘On Our Own’, and if anyone does happen to have read that I’d be interested to know what happens with the plot and whether the dangling threads from the end of this one are ever addressed. But I’m not interested enough to bother ordering the book, so unless I happen to find a copy in a charity shop somewhere I will not be reading any more about Caz.

And, since I have finally ranted myself out on the topic, this is also the end of this book review. I am sadly behind on responding to comments – for which my apologies – and will try to do so in upcoming days. Meanwhile, I will close by once again channeling Richard Ayoade: Thank you for reading, if indeed you still are.

‘The Lost Child’, Anne Atkins: review, Part Five

This is the fifth of a six-part series reviewing the 1994 anti-abortion novel ‘The Lost Child’, which is about protagonist Caz reacting to her mother’s abortion by constructing an elaborate lifelong fantasy about the younger sister she thinks she would have had. At this point in the story, Caz is finishing her own book-within-a-book about the subject, in which she alternates between her experience of her mother’s abortion when she was a child and her fantasies about her imaginary sister Poppy written as though they were actual memories. This post is going to be about the conclusion of that book-within-a-book, in which she reveals (or at least confirms, since it’s probably fairly obvious by now) the truth about Poppy’s imaginary status to her readers.

The book-within-a-book’s conclusion

Caz, after a bit of humming and hawing, comes out with the reveal:

Have at you, then; I shall say it. Know what you’ve already worked out. Poppy is dead. I shall never see her no more.

I do not wish to dismiss Caz’s clear distress over the issue, but can we please keep sight of the fact that Poppy, even within the story, never existed. I do understand that, in this storyline, Caz genuinely sees her mother’s abortion as a sibling she has lost, that this would have been a potential brother or sister for her, that from her perspective she’s lost a sibling, that her grief over this is genuine. But that’s not the same as Poppy being dead. Poppy-the-person, the character described in the book, was never more than a creation of Caz’s imagination.

What more can I say? That I see her death in terms of tabloid headlines? Terrified Child Torn Limb from Limb. Callous Cold-blooded Killing…

Atkins has clearly been reading anti-abortion propaganda; the ‘torn limb from limb’ bit is a classic anti-abortion ploy of describing abortions in the most lurid way possible, at the expense of accuracy. We also now know enough about fetal brain development to know that a fetus doesn’t develop conscious awareness this early and thus a first-trimester fetus isn’t going to feel ‘terrified’ or anything else (though, to be fair, on the level of knowledge available at the time that Atkins wrote this it would not have been unreasonable for her to believe it).

At the time, as a child, I thought my world had gone mad when I found that those who were my greatest security, those I was supposed to turn to in times of most desperate trouble, were monsters of grotesque proportions, perpetrating violence against the innocent.

While Caz could plausibly have read anti-abortion propaganda between her childhood experience and the writing of her book, what she seems to be implying here is that the ‘torn limb from limb’ view of abortions was part of what made such an impact on her back when she first heard about them. The problem with this is that, regardless of what Atkins thinks about the accuracy of this description of a abortion, it doesn’t fit with the plot she’s chosen. The whole point was meant to be that we get the reactions of a child with no prior knowledge of abortion to the euphemistic description she’s given of it. Atkins doesn’t seem to have spotted the contradiction with having this same child apparently aware enough of abortion mechanisms to interpret them in pro-life propaganda terms.

This is, I gather, an adjustmental flaw. Most children can absorb new, even shocking facts about the universe, and modify their worldview to accommodate them. I could not. I still cannot.

Actually, Caz’s (and, by implication, Atkins’s) main adjustmental flaw is that she doesn’t seem capable of recognising anyone else’s viewpoint but her own. Remember that she’s showing no empathy for her mother’s risk of postnatal depression had she continued the pregnancy, and that she couldn’t even comprehend the fact that her lover was able to see her mother’s side of the story as well as hers. And, yes, for all the heavy subtext implications that this adjustmental flaw is Really A Virtue, this sort of rigidity is a major flaw.

Caz talks about how she invented Poppy’s life to deal with ‘the fact that no-one would even acknowledge she had ever been’. Then she moves on to discussing how she now feels about her parents. Or, rather, conspicuously avoiding discussing how she now feels about her parents.

The time has come when I want to say that I don’t blame my parents, because I know that they will read my book and the last thing I want is to cause them any more pain.

Caz, come off it. While it might well be true that you don’t actively want to cause them pain, it’s also true that you are a) publishing the book, b) doing so without discussing it with your parents first, and c) not even trying to anonymise them. Clearly, avoiding pain for your parents is lower priority to you than avoiding any of the above actions. When you can’t even spend the time on a find-and-replace of the names and details in your book to at the very least try to avoid doxxing your mother in the process of publishing her personal life for the edification of the world, let alone think about not publishing it in the first place, don’t try to tell us that causing them pain is ‘the last thing’ you want.

Having assured us that she wants to say that she doesn’t blame her parents, Caz… does not say that she doesn’t blame her parents. Instead, she tells us:

When I was studying the Second World War at school, I couldn’t understand why such a civilised country, which produced Beethoven and Bach and Mozart and Goethe, and some of the most interesting and gentle people I’d ever met, could have allowed six million people to be murdered without a protest. Had they all gone collectively mad?

This, please note, is the next paragraph after Caz’s claim that she wants to say that she doesn’t blame her parents. Yup, nothing says that you don’t blame someone like comparing their actions to the Holocaust.

My teacher explained it to me by saying that many didn’t know, and more didn’t believe what they knew. And those who both knew and believed did what they could before they were arrested and hanged themseles.

But what will posterity say of us? That we all knew, we all believed, and those that condemned did so politely in the newspapers.

This is something I actually remember from my own time as a pro-lifer: actually failing to comprehend that pro-choicers genuinely do not see embryos and fetuses from conception on as being full people with full rights. I really believed that all the people supporting abortion rights must just not know about fetal development, and once they knew all the details it would change their minds. (Shut up; I was naive, OK?) The thing is, once I realised that that wasn’t so, it did give me pause; not in a ‘all those people must just be callously evil!’ way, but a ‘wait, is it possible that there’s something wrong with my conclusions here?’ way. My mind didn’t change at that point, but it was one of the things that sowed the seeds. Atkins doesn’t seem to have had this reaction.

Meanwhile, Caz still notably fails to come out and say that she doesn’t blame her parents. It’s like the scene in ‘Monsters’ University’ when the can design lecturer tells them in their first lecture that some people find can design ‘boring, unchallenging, a waste of a monster’s potential’ and then says nothing to contradict this. The headcanon I was left with is that Caz knows perfectly well on some level that blaming her parents is an unpleasant thing to do that doesn’t fit well with her image of herself, and so is subconsciously struggling with wanting to say that she doesn’t blame her parents but not wanting to do the actual emotional work of not blaming her parents.

However, while the silence remains deafening on the topic of whether Caz blames her parents now, she does tell us this:

Strangely enough, I think that on a subconscious level, emotionally not rationally, without questioning why, as a child I blamed my father not my mother. This was totally unfair of me.

Yes, it was, rather, wasn’t it?

A possibly relevant bit of background here: Atkins happens to have read the same anti-abortion propaganda book as I did back in my anti-abortion days; ‘Two Million Silent Killings’, by Margaret White. I know this because she quotes from it several times for her chapter epigraphs. While it is a mercifully long time since I have read this book, one thing I do remember is that White did try the ‘but why do fathers get no say in what happens to their unborn children!’ argument. I wonder, therefore, whether that’s where Atkins got it from.

By the way, the reason I remember that detail is because it was the one claim I managed to see through even when I’d fallen hook, line, and sinker for the rest; I recognised perfectly well that this supposed concern for giving men ‘a say’ in the decision would be nowhere to be found in a situation where it was the man who wanted the abortion and the woman who didn’t, that pro-lifers were going to be just as much against abortion in a situation where both partners agreed that was what they wanted, and that White was only using the argument because it supported her overall viewpoint, not because it actually stood up. Shame this didn’t give me any pause in questioning everything else she wrote, but at least I spotted that fallacy.

Anyway, however Atkins got there, she seems to have actually spotted the practical flaws in this particular argument while still finding it convincing on an emotional level. This gives her an interesting case of cognitive dissonance:

I believe he would have liked another child. But he is a gentleman and a scholar, and would never have dreamt of compelling my mother to do something against her will. Indeed, such an idea is unthinkable as well as repellent. The man must be a monster who would force his wife to carry a child she didn’t want, even if the law allowed him to, which it didn’t. I have no desire whatsoever to return to a so-called ‘Christian’ society, or emigrate to an ‘Islamic’ state, where a man has powers over his wife and can tell her what to do.

But at this point something atavistic and childlike deep within me cries out in protest against the civilised times we live in. Why can’t a man have some say over his child’s life?

Excuse me, Caz, but your father did have some say. You had a family vote. He cast his vote. He accepted that he was outvoted. That is having some say. I’ve never before seen it made quite so obvious that ‘Why can’t men have a say?’ is code for ‘Let’s look for excuses to stop women from getting abortions!’

And is a woman’s body so precious, I want to ask, that it is worth more, for a few months, than my sister’s whole three score years and ten?

Can we drop the claim that pregnancy and birth are just a matter of ‘a few months’? It’s nine months plus postnatal recuperation time of varying and typically significant degrees of problems, with all sorts of potential complications (speaking of which, let’s once more remember that Caz knows about her mother’s high risk of postnatal depression), some of which can be permanent. And that’s all even without discussing the permanent impact that becoming a parent has on your life.

And, yes, everyone’s rights to their body are that ‘precious’. That’s why we don’t make organ donation compulsory.

It’ll be said, by those who want to say it, that I had problems because of my upbringing. That I suffered a trauma, at the age of five, because of well-meaning parents who were too liberal, who told me too much, who allowed me to know something that a five year old can’t cope with. That I suffered from too much truth. Say that if you must. I’ll never believe it. The truth, in itself, can’t be harmful.

Firstly, I think that, whether or not her parents did the right thing by telling her about her mother’s pregnancy and abortion, the way they dealt with telling her was terrible. Her mother told her about her pregnancy before having made the decision about it, thus giving Caz a chance to get excited over the prospect of having a sister only to have that snatched away from her, and then there was the whole dreadful family vote scene in which she was left feeling that the responsibility for stopping the abortion was somehow on her. If they were going to tell her, it would have been better if they’d presented her with a fait accompli and then sympathised with her disappointment over not getting the sister she wanted. (Caz’s grief and disappointment about this haven’t been properly acknowledged by her parents at any point, and are inextricably tangled with her moral outrage.)

Secondly, regardless of the effect on Caz of knowing vs. not knowing, Caz is showing that her parents were wrong to trust her with the information. She’s about to make a personal and painful episode in her mother’s life public, without discussing that with her mother. While Caz is still focusing only on the impact on herself and what would or wouldn’t have been best for her, I think her mother would have been better off not telling her.

I hope I shall follow my parents’ example, and always tell my own children the truth, however unpleasant it is. If they ask me where we go when we die I shall answer, quite truthfully, that for all I know some godless hell awaits us.

I suspect this is Atkins trying to write what she thinks a nonbeliever might sound like and ending up in ‘said no actual person ever’ territory. In terms of the validity of this approach, it’s like answering “What are we going to do today?” with “Well, for all I know a grisly fatal accident might await us” on the grounds that it’s quite true that for all you know that might be the case. Telling people ‘the truth, however unpleasant it is’ has its points as an approach but does not require deliberately digging up the most unpleasant hypothetical situation possible.

Caz wraps up the epilogue and her book-within-a-book on a positive note, telling us that she’s finally said goodbye to Poppy and is moving on and building her own life, and that she’s looking forward to having her own children ‘and making my own mistakes instead of dwelling on other people’s’, which was more of a self-own than I’d have expected. Thus ends Caz’s book-within-a-book.

There are still a few more chapters of the overall book, all part of the frame story of Caz’s diary and letters. While I’ll review those in a separate and final post, there is one point from the next chapter that seems to fit more neatly in this part of the review, which is the reception of Caz’s book by the ARC reviewers:

My book has been hailed as prophetic, the catalyst to change the law. ‘The tide of morality is turning (I quote), and soon the law will protect the unborn child again, as it has throughout most of history until 1967.’

To get the pedantry out of the way first; I have no idea why Atkins included the words ‘I quote’ in brackets. That’s both unnecessary (since the quote marks show that it’s a quote) and inaccurate (unless the original line she’s quoting included those words in brackets). C’mon, Atkins; according to your Wikipedia page, your degree is in English Language and Literature.

In terms of Atkins’ claim here, this wishful thinking on her part wasn’t fulfilled by her own book either in terms of the law changing or, as far as I can remember, in terms of making much of an impression at all. (To be fair, it was of course almost thirty years ago, but I do spend a good deal of time in bookshops and this book doesn’t ring any bells as anything I remember seeing when it came out).

As for Caz’s book, realistically it’s hard to see why that would make that much of an impression on society’s collective opinions. Why should ‘children’s author wanted a baby sister and didn’t get one’, which is what this boils down to, be a stronger anti-abortion argument than any of the ones we already know? Doylistically, I suspect Atkins thinks she’s written the equivalent of an alternative-universe scenario in which we get to see what a great and talented person the world could have had and what a wonderful relationship Caz would have had with her sister if only it hadn’t been for the abortion. But, of course, that isn’t how the story goes; what we’re actually given is Caz’s idealised imagining of the wonderful sister and trouble-free relationship she thinks she could have had, which isn’t the same thing at all. Watsonianly, meanwhile, I’m headcanoning that Caz’s publishers realised what they’d been saddled with and sent the ARCs off to the most pro-life reviewers they knew of so that at least they got glowing reviews to quote.

Anyway, that’s it for this section. The last post in this series, with review of the final part of the frame story, will be up next. Brace yourselves; it’s another doozy.

‘The Lost Child’, Anne Atkins: review, Part Four (aka 3B)

This is the fourth part of what is now a six-part review of 1990s anti-abortion novel The Lost Child, starting with this post. In the third post, I started reviewing the part of the novel in which protagonist Caz, as part of her own book, tells the story of her life complete with detailed description of a younger sister who is, in fact, entirely a product of her imagination in response to her mother’s abortion. This might make more sense if you start with the first post, but I can’t promise anything on that score. Anyway, this post started out as the second half of that post before I split it, and is the continued story of Caz’s life with her imaginary sister.

Content warning: Mention of child death including national disaster with huge numbers of deaths. Mention of infertility leading to suicide.

 

The letter

Caz – now in her mid-20s and living in her parents’ old house in London at what seems to be largely their expense – gets a letter from a person she knew at university. This is plot-relevant as it ends up inspiring the series of books that will make her name as a children’s author, but it’s also Atkins’ excuse to dive into more moralising.

It probably would be unfair of me to say this if everyone in the comments didn’t already hate the book anyway, but, since it seems you all do, I’ll go ahead: Reading through the general level of annoyance/indignation/outright anger directed at this book in the comments on the previous posts, I have had to fight the urge to say ‘But, guys! Pace yourselves! We’re not even at the really annoying bits yet!’ And, IMO, we are now there. But see what you think.

The letter comes from a Swedish woman whom Caz knew from Oxford. Caz tells us ‘For a term or two we’d been very close’ and that she assumed they’d be friends lifelong, but then Katerina got pregnant and had an abortion, and

Soon afterwards, our friendship, like many an Oxford affair, fizzled out without comment; we found ourselves amongst different friends almost without noticing it.

Come off it, Caz; we already know how you feel both about abortion and about people having different beliefs from you, so, no, you’re not convincing us that this close friendship just coincidentally happened to fizzle out right after her abortion. Also, we get Katerina’s version in the letter, and it’s a sight more plausible from what we know about Caz:

You criticised me, and made me very angry, and our friendship was broken. I still have some hurt in me because of this.

However, it seems that Katerina is not actually writing after all these years just to call Caz out. She’s writing to say that, although she still disagrees with Caz over the abortion, she’s come to agree with her over something else; namely, Caz’s views on the dropping birth rate.

You said we were disposing of our children, and soon there would be nothing left.

‘But wait’, you might possibly be thinking right now (if you are managing coherent thoughts beyond the ‘WTF’ rage-blurt), ‘isn’t this the same Caz who has gone on to have precisely zero children by this point in her life?’ Why, yes, indeed it is. Well, as long as you’re not being hypocritical or anything, Caz.

I didn’t hear you well at the time, the larger thing that you were saying, because you also said that a baby should be more important to me than my studies, with which I very strongly disagree: our grandmothers and great-grandmothers worked very hard to allow us to put our minds before our bodies.

So… it was all right for Katerina to decide something was more important to her than having a baby, but she doesn’t like the fact that other people are making the same choice? Well, as long as you’re not being hypocritical or anything, Katerina.

But now that I have lived in Sweden again for nearly three years, I see a society robbed of some of its most beautiful people. Here, the middle-class members value their salaries, and their careers, and their fine homes and materials. And they have one child, perhaps, or sometimes none. […] Perhaps you say I shouldn’t criticise, as I didn’t want a child in that time and place.

Ding ding ding! But more to the point, Katerina, do you have any children now? If you think Sweden needs more children, by all means have some instead of complaining about all those other people who don’t. (And if there are reasons why that’s not an option for you, then please bear in mind that you have no idea how many of the people about whose choices you’re complaining have the same reasons or ones equally valid.)

I don’t criticise: I merely observe.

Ah, ‘merely observing’. The companion to ‘just asking questions‘.

And the streets are empty and cold.

I do want to point out again here that this is Sweden. I’m sure the streets are cold, but that’s hardly due to the lack of children.

And the mountains are climbed by old people who have taken early retirement. And more than half the desks in the schools are empty.

It’s interesting that, although this is clearly meant as alarmism, it’s actually describing some positive things. If older people are still up to mountain climbing and can enjoy early retirement, I think that’s great for them. If class sizes are smaller, that’s a good thing for the children still there, who can benefit from more individual attention (though I expect the teachers will in fact have the sense to take the unoccupied desks out and do something more constructive with the space).

And what the government does not tell us is that the recession which has been eating our society for many years will soon cause it to collapse unless something can be made to change.

I don’t know whether Swedish society is actually close to collapse or whether Atkins is exaggerating (it seemed to be going strong last I heard anything on the matter), but she actually has touched on a genuine and well-known problem here. We’ve developed the technologies for successful contraception at around the same time as developing the technologies that greatly expand life span, with the result that we have increasing numbers of old people at the same time as getting decreasing numbers of the new babies who will some day grow up to replenish the healthy working population who will be needed to support all these dependent elderly financially and sometimes physically. So on the plus side the population is decreasing overall, which is something our overstrained planet desperately needs, but on the minus side we’re ending up with an increasingly unbalanced population, with too high a ratio of dependent elderly to people who are fit to work.

I haven’t yet seen a good solution to this conundrum, but that’s not a valid reason to leap after bad solutions. ‘Expect people to have children they don’t want, then berate them when they don’t do this’ strikes me as a bad solution by any measure.

There is an old, old myth […] You will know this story, through your poet Browning, as ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’. Earlier versions of the tale do not have the rats; the basic element of the story is simply that the town gets rid of its children. Sometimes there are some disfigured, poor children left behind. The beautiful ones always disappear.

Wow. Just… wow. I’m actually lost for words at this implication that the loss of children only matters if they’re appropriately attractive and rich. But it gets worse:

Perhaps this story is based on true events: the last time such a thing happened was in your Welsh town, Aberfan, in the 1960s. Usually, the society which loses its children is to blame in some way.

WHAT THE ACTUAL FSJKDJFJKJ (keyboard smash)…

I’m guessing most or all of the people reading this will not have heard of the Aberfan tragedy (even in Britain, I don’t think it’s widely known these days; it’s only by chance that I’ve previously read about it) and will not know what this is all about, so I’ll explain. Content warning, again, for major tragedy involving multiple child deaths.

Aberfan is a Welsh mining village. As is typical practice, the waste coming out of the mine was piled up in giant piles known as ‘spoil tips’ or ‘slag heaps’. During the ’50s and ’60s, Aberfan residents repeatedly expressed concerns over the stability of one such tip which was piled up on a hill overlooking the primary school, but their concerns were ignored by the National Coal Board. On 25th October 1966, the spoil tip spilled over and buried the school and the nearby houses in an avalanche of mud and slurry. A hundred and forty-four people were killed, most of them children. The subsequent inquiry found that blame for the tragedy lay squarely with the National Coal Board. Their negligence, in the face of the repeated concerns from the residents, had caused the tragic death of so many of the village’s children.

Now, I suppose Atkins might be lumping the NCB and Aberfan together in her mind as all part of the same society, which would make her comment here technically accurate. However, when you are referring to an incident in which the poor and the powerless suffered the worst possible loss due to being unable to change the behaviour of the callously indifferent well-off, talking about blame in a way that sounds as though you’re attributing it to the people who suffered the loss is about as appallingly tactless as you can get. This is a viewpoint that Atkins apparently thought it was quite all right to write down unchallenged and submit for publication. Wow.

From using mass child death to score a point, to using suicide to score a point:

But something has happened recently which made me see it in a wider context, and prompted my letter to you. A friend of my sister’s has committed suicide because the doctors told her she could never have children.

Given the context, the implication of including this particular tragedy seems to be ‘if only there were more spare babies around that she could have adopted!’. Now, my heart goes out to anyone who wants children but doesn’t get the chance to have them. It’s a horribly sad situation to be in. However, I really don’t like the attitude that this imposes obligations on random other people to go through unwanted pregnancies and give up the newborns.

It has been impossible to adopt children in Sweden for many years now,

There is a whole tangential debate here that I feel the need to comment on but hope to keep brief. While it would be wonderful to picture a society that cared for its children so well that no children were stuck in foster care without permanent families, I doubt very much that this is what Atkins meant; I suspect what she was actually picturing was the impossibility of adopting babies. Sweden might well have very few babies available to adopt; that’s certainly the case in the UK, due to a combination of reasonably available contraception and abortion and a passable social support system, and from what I’ve heard Sweden is better at those things than we are and probably therefore has even fewer babies in need of adoption. However, while it might also have fewer older children in foster care than we do, I really doubt if the number’s zero either now or when Atkins was writing this.

The reason this topic is contentious is because of a school of thought that anyone who wants to adopt should be trying to adopt an older child from foster care rather than a baby, a claim which I suspect is about to get made forcefully in the comments (hi, Katydid!). So, I’m going to say up front here that I actually disagree with this. I think that older-child adoption is an excellent option which I would love to see more people exploring; what I object to is the idea that it should be an obligation for would-be adopters. Adopting an older child with a traumatic history is a whole different kettle of fish from starting out with a baby, there are excellent reasons why even people who want to be parents might not be up for older-child adoption, and going in reluctantly can do far more harm than good.

However. With all that said… I do find it highly distasteful that Atkins is not only ignoring the existence of this option, but is doing so in the context of an implied ‘if only there had been some children around to adopt so that this poor woman wasn’t driven to suicide’. Older children in foster care do exist and are not chopped liver. So Atkins is implying here not only that childlessness is a fate worse than death, but that adopting an older child is also. About the best thing I can say about that is that I think at least the second of those two implications was unintentional.

and it is not usually legal to adopt from another country.

I’ve no idea why Atkins thought this, but it seems to be flat-out wrong. Adoption from abroad is, apparently, not only legal but reasonably common in Sweden. I was willing to allow that perhaps things had been different back in 1994 when Atkins was writing… and then I remembered reading this autobiography by a woman born in Brazil who was legally adopted by Swedish parents back in (checks book) 1991, just three years before ‘The Lost Child’ was published. I’m guessing Atkins just made this bit up to suit her story.

So she kills herself. I find it tragic, too, that even in our advanced society a woman can find nothing to do with her life but have babies.

This last line clashes rather oddly with the context. Katerina seems to be presenting this tragedy as another warning against the consequences of the general dearth of appropriate baby-production in society, and she’s certainly chosen to write to someone who she knows will agree with that viewpoint. But she’s simultaneously lamenting the idea of women being too devoted to having babies. I’m honestly not quite sure what note Atkins was trying to hit here; I think she was trying to present the ideas Katerina presents in this letter while at the same time depicting Katerina as one of these misguided (in Atkins’ eyes) women who thinks there’s something deeply wrong with devoting your life to having babies, and didn’t entirely think through the contradiction.

Anyway, this is almost the end of the letter, and is the end of the moralising part of the letter. Katerina tells Caz she misses her and hopes to see her again, and signs off. We now get to the point of all this plot-wise, which is…

The book series and the fictitious artist

All this stuff about a society without children inspires Caz to write an illustrated children’s book about children disappearing from London into a fantasy land. This sells very well and Caz follows it up with a series about the one child who remains behind in an otherwise childless city, which, again, is a huge success and makes Caz’s name as an author.

However, here is the really weird part; she publishes these books as a collaboration with Poppy. She attributes the artwork to Poppy and the writing to herself, and publishes the books in both their names.

This raises some major questions. As far as I can gather from the text, Caz didn’t even tell her publishers the truth. So… how did that work? What happened when they wanted contracts signed? What about the payments? Did Caz end up collecting a double share of royalties under this pretence of being two separate people? Wasn’t that fraud? That goes way beyond enjoying pretend conversations with your imaginary sister in your quiet moments.

And what about her family? It’s established that Caz has two parents and two brothers, with all of whom she’s still in contact; they’d have kept track of her glorious writing success and wanted to see her books. (In fact, it’s explicitly mentioned that Jack, now married to Shangani, bought them for his children). Did they have no reaction to seeing her claim to be collaborating with a non-existent sister? What on earth??

Atkins doesn’t address any of these issues at all. As far as I can see, she sees Caz as driven to these lengths by her mother’s abortion and hence entirely justified in taking the whole bizarre fantasy as far as she does. It doesn’t seem to occur to Atkins to consider how it would realistically be seen by the different people in Caz’s life.

Anyway, the series sells extremely well (which Caz attributes to the deep-seated loneliness of modern British children, because parents are having smaller families and not spending much time with their children, hint, hint) and Caz and Poppy become household names despite refusing to give any interviews about the books. Caz does do other writing of her own and does sometimes give interviews regarding those pieces, and tells us that she is ‘constantly’ asked why Poppy never appeared. That seems like more interest than the media would actually show in a children’s book illustrator not wanting to do interviews (and also seems ironic in view of the unintended implication that her own family were so implausibly uninterested in the whole setup). However, Atkins wants a set-up for the writing of the book-within-a-book, and so Caz tells us that she wrote this book to answer the question.

And on that note, the last-but-one chapter of the book-within-a-book ends. That leaves the conclusion of the book-within-a-book, in which we will get the Big Reveal about Poppy being imaginary, and then several more chapters of Caz’s frame story. I’m planning one more post for each of those parts.