Linda McCullough, a denizen of the dock city of Durbs, has been selling books to her fellow Natalians for more than a decade. “What a pleasure. As they say in the classics, I read to both lose and find myself, and count myself truly blessed that my work is also one of my all time favourite hobbies.”
Wow! I usually have four or five books going at a time but about a third of the way through The Son-in-Law, I forsook all others to pursue the story of the Wildes and the Princes alone.
The lives of both these families change in one moment when Joseph Prince strikes his wife, Zoe; a blow which leads to her death; an event which is witnessed by their children. When Joseph leaves prison three years later he has lost almost everything – his job, his home, his family. He has only one driving goal in mind – to get his children back.
The story is so easy to read and yet so emotionally engaging that I found myself vacillating between sympathy and judgement as each of the main characters’ stories unfold. What Joseph Prince did was unforgiveable. And yet, there were extenuating circumstances…sort of... Hannah, Zoe’s mother and now the primary carer of her children, is rightly righteous in her anger and fierce in her protection of her grandchildren. And yet did she and her husband give Joseph and Zoe enough honesty and support in their circumstantially volatile marriage?
Charity Norman handles the emotion of the story with much depth and astuteness. I found myself alarmed as Theo, Joseph and Zoe’s middle child, handles his distress with violence and withdrawal; moved to tears as Ben, the baby, struggles with wanting to be with his father, and yet not wanting to distress his grandmother who is the only mother he has truly known. But it is Scarlet’s plight, and the wonderful dignity of Frederick Wilde, that captivated me the most. My heart went out to the 10 year old Scarlet who witnesses her mother’s death and tries to save her, and again to the thirteen year old Scarlet who works so hard to take care of her brothers, and who is alone with her beloved grandfather when he has his big stroke. And the character, Frederick Wilde, is so gently and superbly written, as first his body and then his mind betrays him, and yet who, even in this reduced state is able to effect the reconciliation which his family so desperately needs.
After I finished the last page of the book and closed its covers, I had to sit a moment to recover myself and to remind myself that I hadn’t actually lived the story which I had just finished, though that is what it felt like.