You Be Mother by Meg Mason
This is the first novel by Meg Mason. I do hope that, like me, you read her excellent novel Sorrow and Bliss from 2021. This was one of my books of lockdown with its perfect mix of sharp humour and emotional power. Whilst You Be Mother is not as finely crafted, it shares that book’s trick of spot on comic set pieces combined with emotional depth and pathos. Both books deal with grief and loss as well as the messiness of life; and both offer shards of resilience and kindness that make them ultimately hopeful.
At the start of the book, there is one of those coincidences that happen only in novels. Two young women have an interaction at an airport: one is sunnily assured, attractive, with the open disposition of the privileged middle class – she is travelling from Australia to take up an acting job in London; the other is a very young mother, with weeks old baby, from lower down the social rung, trying to maintain calm at the daunting long-haul journey she is making to Australia. Whilst the nature of this first meeting is insignificant, these two women represent the twin strands of this modern take on what it means to be a parent and a member of a family. Inevitably and quite quickly their two worlds become entwined in an amusingly complex and resonant manner.
Abi, a young mother from a depressingly grey part of Croydon, is the book’s protagonist and one of several mothers to whom we are introduced. We quickly learn that she is from a dysfunctional home with a mother, Rae, who rarely leaves home and alleviates her narrow world with constant television and celebrity filled magazines. Abi is quietly desperate to gain an education that will open the world to her. She is a voracious reader, is studying to gain a social work degree and works part time at the university.
And then she falls pregnant by an Australian exchange student, Stu, who has subsequently returned home. He is immature and used to being pampered by his domineering mother, Elaine, but he is also decent and arranges for Abi and baby Jude to come over to Australia so that they can make a go at being a family. For a whole range of reasons, not fully explored at this point in the story, Abi decides to take the chance – after all it’s a gamble for a young mother with little life experience and no means of supporting herself to travel across the globe to be with a man she has only known for a few months. Here, though, we are given some hint of the inner steel and resilience that Abi has needed to survive her deadening home life; and it is this quiet competence and determination that enables her to form a life for herself in Sydney.
At first, however, when she arrives there, things don’t work out well. Stu has, via his parents, been able to offer Abi and Jude a modest home of her own. Stu, who has little money because of his studies, is out at work or university most of the day and decides to spend weekdays with his parents. He loves Abi and Jude but can’t cope with the responsibilities of being a father. Encouraged by his mother, who feels she needs to protect her own son from what she sees as a premature and damaging entanglement with Abi, he ends up neglecting his new family; Abi, therefore, has to build a new life alone.
This is when the book takes off because she meets Phyllida (Phyll), an attractive, friendly and charismatic older woman, at the communal swimming pool. Their friendship quickly blossoms. The attraction for Abi is obvious: apart from Stu’s neglect, Phyll’s intelligence and love of books appeals to her thirst for a larger life. Phyll understands the younger woman’s neediness but we also see Abi through the older woman’s eyes and begin to appreciate her liveliness, intelligence and potential. Both woman also bond over their love for Jude. They settle into a close almost familial routine; and gradually Mason reveals each woman’s back story. Many of the assumptions we, the reader, have made about dependence, need and emotional security are challenged. Both have been damaged by grief and loneliness.
Which brings me back to that chance encounter at the airport and the second narrative that Mason develops. Birgitta, the Australian actress we meet on her way to London theatre role, is Phyll’s youngest daughter. She has kindness and good intentions but to use a fashionable, contemporary phrase, she is a hot mess. Within a short time of arriving in the country she is involved in a relationship with her married director. She expects him to leave his family, but Mason shows us that it’s just not going to happen – he is too self-centred and self-regarding to put himself in a messy situation. However, as Mason showed in Sorrow and Bliss, she has a knack of exposing such a toxic example of masculinity to ridicule. The problem for Birgitta means that she becomes embroiled in yet another personal problem that her capable older sister Polly has to sort out. Birgitta is eventually bundled home and then, of course, the two strands clash.
There is perhaps a little too much plot in this final phase of the story. Abi’s hopes of making a better life for herself and recreating in some form or other the family life she has lost, oscillate extravagantly. Her presence in Phyll’s life also forces her broken family group, that seems so conventional on the surface, to face up to their dysfunction. The action moves back and forth between London and Sydney. However, that does not mean Mason is not exploring important ideas about families, and she continually keeps the reader wrong-footed about how we expect the characters to behave. Ultimately, though, most of the characters are decent and well meaning. Similar to Sorrow and Bliss the male characters, narcissistic director excluded, are sympathetic. Stu gets his act together and his dad and Polly’s husband are the solid, dependable figures who keep the show on the road for each of their families. The thing is, though, they are pale creations in comparison to the women. Now that may of course be the case in real life – women embody the colour and emotional vibrancy that men lack…perhaps. The point is, though, that this novel, whilst enjoyable, thoughtful and emotionally satisfying, reads like an early novel with characters and plotting that occasionally needed more refinement.