The family -- a playing field or a battlefield? For some, nostalgic memories, for others, a time to regret. Dear old dad or drunken old man? Angelic mum or a witch? Brother and sister always on your side or not? Home sweet home or runaways? Truth be told there are both.
We can't choose our relatives, but we can our friends. Children are stuck with the parents they were born to. They have to adjust to them. Not so the reverse. Parents make a constant effort to mould their kids. The problem is that all too many children resist being moulded.
It becomes complicated when children make an effort to mould their parents, a generation behind the times. British author Martina Cole has made such family complications her niche in literature. Set in London's East End, her stories are filled with the expletives of that area of the Smoke.
Betrayal is the most recent of her dozens of novels. The focus is on the O'Haras -- parents, three sons, a daughter. Reeva, mum, is a not-difficult-to-imagine character. Working at a supermarket she smokes, drinks, tells funny stories, makes trouble, assists her friends in need.
Her eldest son, Aiden, is the protagonist of the story. An indifferent student, he leaves school at 15 to be the major support of the family. Big in size, with a fierce temper, he bullies the neighbourhood as well as the family. The local drug lord takes him under his wing.
Brutal to enemies, charming to women, at 18 he makes a woman twice his age pregnant. She moves in with him. Aiden Jr is born. Running strip joints money comes in, as well as from drugs. His domineering ways turn the family against him. He is irate when grown Jr weds a girl from Jamaica.
Easy to blow his top, impossible to reason with, unwilling to listen to reason, it's agreed that the family patriarch is due for extreme prejudice. It is up to a younger brother to do the honours.
This reviewer believes no other writer could get away with it. But Martina Cole's dialogue makes her solutions feasible. Reducing the length of her books would be a boon.
Extraordinary century
While we think of the world in terms of countries, they came on the scene fairly recently. For millennia there were tribes and city-states, with some empires. Provinces, self-sustaining, had their own rulers who fought the efforts of a so-called king to give up their sovereignty and unify.
Then again the king sat uneasily on his throne as others regarded themselves more entitled and better fit to wear the crown. Wars of succession were numerous and sanguinary. Dynasties changed, the previous ones losing their heads. This was especially common during the 15th century. The 1400s were indeed active.
Byzantine Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, the Moors were finally driven from Spain, America was discovered, the Pope was supreme, the Renaissance was in bloom, the Mongol threat receded. Joan of Arc was handed over by Burgundy to the English.
In England, King Edward VI fell into a sickness, the House of York and the House of Lancaster scrambled to replace him in the War of the Roses, the House of Tudor in the wings waiting for its opportunity. Richard of York was victorious in a series of battles.
He held the sceptre as Richard III before his overthrow by the Tudors. His two years of rule were largely remembered because Shakespeare wrote a play about him, making him appear a monster. But was he? Historians have mixed feelings. Among them Britain's Robyn Young.
She is in the process of penning a trilogy of historical novels about him. Sons Of The Blood is the first. Detailing one of the battles, she points out how unreliable "allies" were, changing sides so as to appear among the victors. As for his two nephews he put in the Tower of London, there's no conclusive proof that he then murdered them.
In the author's view, Richard III was a competent monarch, but was overwhelmed by his enemies. The Bard's dumping on him was to toady to the Tudors in power, Elizabeth I the queen. Not that Young supports Richard III, but believes history is treating him unfairly.
This reviewer should mention that her previous historical fiction trilogy put Scotland's Robert the Bruce in the best light.
