Predictable plausibility

This Child of Mine

Her stories are down-to-earth, set in familiar territory, and peopled by mostly recognisable characters. Although her prose is always conventional, she has command of her material and a talent for making the reader believe that ordinary people can get away with unusual things such as, in this case, kidnapping.

Don’t be alarmed — this is not a horrible ransom crime. If anything, it is similar to Gone Baby Gone, a grim scenario in which a neglected child is abducted through the kindest of motives. In Moriarty’s plot the criminal is a teacher who works with deprived children, victims of domestic circumstances which threaten their well-being and sometimes their lives.

Anna has to maintain a daily balancing act between the rights of her pupils with the rights of parents who only realise they have rights when someone tries to remind them that they also have responsibilities. Childless herself, all Anna’s devotion goes into caring for these little potential delinquents.

Unknown to Anna, Laura is a single mother whose reluctant parenting wavers according to the availability of drugs or alcohol. Her child is the result of a single intoxicated episode and is bitterly resented.

While an anxious granny does her best to bridge the maternal chasms, it is this pair of mother and infant who are encountered by Anna on her way to England to begin a new life after the break-up of her marriage in the aftermath of yet another miscarriage. Following this highly coincidental meeting (coincidence is not something which worries Moriarty at all), these strands separate to make two, almost distinct, novels until they are skilfully woven back together.

In her control of these episodes and the points at which they collide with one another, the writer is at her strongest, providing totally convincing characters, households, affiliations and associations, and working fluidly through generational differences and conflicts in attitude and experience.

Perhaps it is a little too smooth, though. Just as those children described in the initial chapters speak a language far too efficient for five-year-olds, so the discoveries and arrangements of the later pages flow too easily past the predictable barriers of law and likelihood.

Because they are predictable, however, Sinead Moriarty is ready for them and provides solutions of the ‘with one bound he was free’ variety. While these miraculous evasions depend on everyone behaving with an imaginative generosity all too rare in cases of baby-snatching, they are made here to seem just possible.

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