Faith Fox: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Dark comedy of familial love
Review: Faith Fox is three months old at the end of this dark and witty comedy, which opens with her birth and the shocking, unexpected death of her bursting-with-health mother, Holly. Two-time Whitbread winner Gardam ("The Hollow Land" "The Queen of the Tambourine") turns her unsparing eye on the manner in which Holly's circle deals with her death.

Her busy husband, Andrew, turns Faith over to his ascetic, religious brother, Jack, and resurrects an affair with Jocasta, his brother's wife. Thomasina, Holly's shattered mother, shocks everyone by running off to Egypt with a retired general, never having set eyes on her grandchild. Thomasina's friend, Pammie, indulges her virtuous side at every convenient opportunity.

Faith is barely visible, handed off from Pammie's hired nurse to a Tibetan refugee on Jack's combination sheep farm and haven for the "underprivileged." No one ever has the time to take her to her paternal grandparents, who are too old and sick to make the trip themselves.

The anxious grandparents, and Jocasta's son, Philip, a brilliant, dyslexic boy who keeps Faith in the forefront of his mind, are the novel's most appealing characters. Acerbic and funny, but without the venal self-absorption of the rest of the gang, these three help work the story to a satisfying conclusion, as Gardam adroitly allows all of her characters at least a modicum of self-knowledge. This is a love story - in the most complex sense of the word.

Rating:
Summary: My Favorite Novel of 2003
Review: If you haven't read Gardam, you're missing out. She was a Booker Prize finalist years ago, and FAITH FOX, published a few years back in the UK but newly published in hardcover here, is my favorite of her novels. This comical, sophisticated, breezy novel opens with the death of exuberant Holly Fox in childbirth. The question afterward is: who will raise her baby, Faith? For various complex reasons, no one close to Holly wants Faith. During the ensuing pages, we learn the stories of Holly's mother, who runs off to Egypt with a retired general, too devastated by her daughter's death to care for her grandchild; Holly's husband, a surgeon too busy to raise the child and, incidentally, in love with his brother's artist wife; his brother, who runs an odd quasi-hippie religious commune in the north of England and agrees, in keeping with the Christian spirit, to care for Faith; and a very funny busybody neighbor of Holly's mother. Gardam writes fantastically well, like a cross between Penelope Lively and Fay Weldon. And, in case you're wondering, the baby isn't the central character--this charming novel of manners is about adults learning to face up to responsibility to other adults, as well as to children.