Another Mother’s Son by Janet Davey review – trauma and tedium in Palmers Green

Davey excels at capturing emotion in a depiction of parenthood that becomes exhausting in its attention to detail

Lorna Parry, the protagonist of Janet Davey’s fifth novel, is a divorcee living in Palmers Green. She has three sons; one 17, one at university, and the eldest retired to his bedroom – apparently for good. Lorna’s voice is wry (“gestation like rats,” she notes of her ex-husband’s speed in producing a new baby) and sad: “I sing at one point,” she says, driving her son to university, “because we are on the road and moving, but Oliver catches sight of my lips and gestures to me to cut it out.”

Davey’s own voice is acute: a flock of pigeons “heave like the contents of an exposed gut”, Sunday evenings are a “harbour wall by an estuary”, the word “hope” is decoded as “mental exertion – backward in conjectures and forward in previsions – earth-moving equipment behind it”. She excels at expounding feelings: returning from university, Oliver “bears the invisible marks of a person who has got away and whose return will be temporary … a little more lordly … a shade more polite”; in the breakdown of a marriage emotions whir “like rotor blades: metal and air, false and true … indistinguishable …[till] the amount of lift produced by the speed exceeds the weight of the situation, they … grow lighter and slowly leave the ground”.”

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