my view of it...
Family Planning was the second of the largely epistolary novels, but this time the reason for the characters choosing letters as their preferred form of communication is quite different from in Home Thoughts. Here we have the parents and three of the four children of a crazy family all trying to hide from each other because none of them wants to take responsibility for looking after the fourth and oldest child, the schizophrenic Raymond. Yet, these people are incapable of breaking off contact with each other. The truth is they're fascinated with each other and all drawn, as if by a centrifugal force, toward the embattled relationship of Mother and Father. Hence the constant letters and sporadic, but always explosive meetings. Then into the family come two forces for change, the American husband of the only daughter, the comically Italian girlfriend of one of the younger twins. Their attempts to get their partners out of this suffocating family only serve to reveal the underlying dynamic at work, and lead, in the end, to catastrophe. The book was put together on the basis of observations of people I know all too well and my interest, I confess, was entirely in the family relationships, not the schizophrenic himself. Only years later did I discover that there was a whole literature on the parents and siblings of schizophrenics, a literature that suggests connections between family and mental illness. But that's another question.
'Incisive and insightful … Parks has an unflinching eye that penetrates like an x-ray'
'Funny, compassionate, frightening and precisely observant'
'Resolutely unsentimental and very entertaining'
A mad rush for the morning mail
Okay, if you want to buy this book, those in Europe click here and those in the States here. You'll get taken directly to the appropriate Amazon page.
...and a couple of reviews
Short takes
The New York Times
Times Literary Supplement
The New Yorker
Linda Brandon
The Independent, 29 April 1989
Tim Parks has a sharp eye for the mania behind the privet hedge. Casualties of suburban family life litter his three previous novels; this time they are squarely centre-stage.
Set in modern Britain, Family Planning parodies Victorian values in more ways than one. The Baldwins, clever, selfish, and energetically unpleasant towards each other, are great letter writers. When Mum and Dad return from the Middle East with Raymond, their schizophrenic eldest son, there is a sudden rush of letters. what is to be done about Raymond, who joins in the correspondence with death threats and pornographic notes? Whose fault is it that the most intelligent and charm-ing of the Baldwins has turned into an obese, unwashed monster convinced that the CIA are substituting spies for the members of his family?
None of them does much to allay Raymond's suspicions. Dad, who never wanted a family anyway, but has a "strong and sentimental sense of himself as a patriarch", makes a quick getaway to Algeria while his wife, after years of guilty patience, finally goes for Raymond with a cake knife when he carves up the family cat. Sister Lorna, married to an American keen to pass "life's" great milestones" on schedule, thinks she might bypass family planning altogether. Gary keeps a low, if handsome, profile, until his career hopes sink with the SDP. Then he ostentatiously martyrs himself as Raymond's minder. And yuppie Graham keeps wondering how much, for heaven's sake, is it all going to cost?
Letters fly like missiles through this tautly constructed novel, brilliantly revealing the characters through their own words and creating an apt metaphor for family life: no-one listens to anyone else and in the end these monologues aren't that different from Raymond's delusions.
There is Baldwin method in Raymond's madness; his canny bouts of sanity are particularly galling to the others. Having driven them all to distraction, desertion or premature senility, he writes a triumphant letter to the International Court of Human Rights denouncing them as frauds: 'the first and most devastating proof is quite simply that none of my "family" behave as if they were in any way related to me, and when they do attempt to do so their simulation is nauseatingly evident.'
Parks's cool, racy style can seem formulaic (hmmm), but he has a gift for making the contrived ring true. Out of parody come real horrors, and his perception of insanity, on a number of levels, is disturbingly authentic.
Home front
Michael Dibdin
The Observer, 23 April 1989
If Alan Ayckbourn were to write novels rather than plays, then he'd be a damn fool, seeing what most novelists get paid (here here!), but the result might well resemble Tim Parks's Family Planning. Parks presents a light treatment of a serious theme in a tight five-act structure, featuring a manageable number of character parts and a fully-rounded female role to add depth(do I see innuendo here?).
The Baldwin family's precarious equilibrium is abruptly shattered when the parents return to Britain with their eldest son Raymond, a schizophrenic engaged in a one-man jihad. Recriminations and home-truths fly as the other children - Graham a proselytising yuppie; Garry, an indecisive loser with altruistic urges; and Lorna, an academic drop-out working as a hack ghost-writer - are plunged into a guerrilla war over what to do about Raymond, how to manage the family's crumbling assets, and above all, who is to foot the bill. Meanwhile Mr and Mrs Baldwin quietly plan their escape, she into madness, he to another job abroad.
Parks exploits the possibilities of this scenario with great resourcefulness. The ease and economy with which relationships are shuffled and the characters made to reveal themselves, largely through their own words, is remarkable. As with Ayckbourn, one is left with a slight suspicion that the characters, while supposedly free agents, are in collusion with an author who is not so much paring his fingernails as loading the dice. But there is no doubting Parks's ability to entertain (that's more like it), or his understanding of family politics in a society where responsibility means signing a cheque, or more usually finding reasons why someone else should do so.
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