The Facts of Life

Martha Vine has seven daughters and a will of iron, and in wartime Coventry that combination is the only social security her family has. The youngest, Cassie, is the odd one: she hears voices, wanders off, sings songs she has no way of knowing, and comes home from the night of the great raid pregnant by a man she cannot describe. Martha's solution is a rota. The child, Frank, will be passed among the sisters in turn, six months at a time, so that no one household bears the cost and Cassie is never left alone with him for long. So Frank grows up in a series of Englands: a spiritualist's parlour, a hard-drinking pub, a bourgeois household with ambitions, a bohemian artists' commune in the countryside, a communist's terrace. He has inherited something of his mother's sight and nobody wants to hear about it. Joyce writes the Midlands in the 1940s and 50s with real affection and a fine ear for the family's argumentative warmth, and lets the supernatural stay domestic, a matter of what the women of one family have always half known. It is a novel about how a child is assembled out of other people's convictions.