Things can only get.... weirder (May Contain Nuts - John O'Farrell)

Member Name: sheri3004

Product:	May Contain Nuts - John O'Farrell
Date:	01/06/06 (146 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Highly readable, often hilarious satire on a certain type of parent

Disadvantages: The book's "message" may not be acceptable to all!

Having read and thoroughly enjoyed John O'Farrell's two previous novels - not to mention "Things Can Only Get Better", his hilarious memoir of life as a Labour supporter under 18 years of Tory (mis)rule - I was looking forward to reading his latest, a satire on modern middle-class parenting.

Clapham definitely contains more than a handful of nuts, at least if the characters in this book are anything to go by! The novel is narrated by Alice Chaplin, mother of three - eleven-year-old Molly and her two younger brothers, Jamie and Alfie ("Nobody had told us that the '-ie/-y' suffix wasn't actually compulsory."). The children attend a private "prep" school in order to avoid the appalling prospect of mingling with the locals; their "free" time is rigidly timetabled with clubs and classes to enable the little darlings to get a head start on their contemporaries, to which they are - naturally - ferried around in Alice's 4x4. They are dosed with herbal remedies to help them with their maths and - of course - assumed to have all manner of unproven food intolerances for which they must avoid nuts, wheat, dairy and - well, pretty much everything, really. (Early in the book, one of the mothers - Sarah - swoops "like a presidential bodyguard" to pluck a biscuit from the hand of her toddler. "'May contain nuts' - yes, I thought so". When another parent comments that they didn't know Cameron had a nut allergy, she replies, "Well, we don't know whether he has or not - we've never exposed him to them. It's just not worth taking the risk, is it?".)

Essentially, the children are protected from any risk of encountering life outside the safe middle-class bubble, and are expected to be not just high achievers but geniuses. (The parents are disappointed when their child is assessed as merely "approaching gifted". It's "exceptionally gifted" or nothing!)

While the children seem to have a resignedly long-suffering attitude to their demanding lifestyle, the parents are insanely competitive. By far the worst is the ghastly Ffion, a woman who e-mails the other parents with league tables of their children's achievements - with her own daughter, naturally, at the top. Alice and her husband David are hardly immune, though, and in fact Alice goes to the furthest extremes of all in her bid to win a place for Molly at the exclusive Chelsea College and fend off the awful spectre of Battersea Comprehensive…..

The characters are well drawn, if too extreme to be believable - but it's a satire, after all. Ffion is particularly dreadful but the others don't lag too far behind. Only Sarah's husband, William, seems to maintain some grip on reality by interjecting sardonic comments at regular intervals.

While the characters here certainly go to bizarre extremes, many parents will feel an uncomfortable jolt of recognition at some of the behaviour described. (Who hasn't tried, at some stage, to "improve" their child's school project in the hope of a better grade?) And it certainly appears to be true, from what we hear, that parents will go to great lengths to get their children into the school of their choice.

I really like John O'Farrell's writing - there are many laugh-out-loud moments here, as in his other books. He clearly has a message to convey and has some - largely valid - points to make about private education (and yes, I do know that the situation is not always that simple) but is not unduly heavy-handed in doing so. The eventual denouement is satisfying and it's easy to see that (at least some of) the characters have developed and moved on from their narrow preoccupations.

The issue of racism is also raised. Earlier in the book, on a rare trip on foot to the local Blockbuster, Alice's insularity is illustrated by her trauma at the approach of three black teenagers. Panicking and convinced she is about to be mugged, she scuttles back to the house to jump into the safety of her 4x4, despite the fact that the young men clearly have no interest in her whatsoever. Simply, she is alarmed and frightened by anything which is outside her own white middle-class world. Later, Alice is forced to confront her own fears when her daughter Molly becomes friendly with Ruby, a young black girl from the local council estate who has applied to the same school. While some of Alice's preconceptions are challenged by involvement with Ruby and her family, her friends are less open-minded - at one point, awful Ffion whispers, "Has it occurred to you that her mother might be a prostitute?"!! Some may find O'Farrell's approach to this subject rather overly simplistic, but it is undoubtedly true that the kind of casual, unexamined racism illustrated by some characters does still exist.

All in all, a very enjoyable read which is likely to cause the reader to laugh and shudder in more or less equal measure.

Black Swan paperback, 400 pages - cover price £6.99. Available from the usual sources.

Summary: Modern parenting as extreme sport