The Good Children – novel set in Lahore (and in New England, and in London…)

1st December 2014

The Good Children by Roopa Farooki: novel set in Lahore (and in New England, and in London).

The Good Children in question – Sully, Jakie, Mae, and Lena – are the offspring of Dr and Mrs Saddeq, residents of Lahore in West Bengal when the story opens in the 1940s – and of Lahore in Pakistan (though they have passed on) when it ends in 2010. Roopa Farooki (herself a Pakistani, born in Lahore, brought up in London – and now living in the South of England and the South of France) chronicles the life of each child through from the 1940s to what is, in effect, the present. Each child is very different… As late teenagers, the two boys, Sully and Jakie, are despatched to the States and England respectively to study to be doctors. It is the first time they have been separated. Each ends up successful – Sully as an acknowledged expert on the psychological traits of those who kill and torture ‘for fun’, and Jakie as a prominent GP in Notting Hill, London. But getting there is not easy… Jakie was a ‘brown’ doctor in the NHS of the 1950s… with all the unwitting racial prejudice that was involved. It didn’t help, of course, that he fell in love with a somewhat challenging Irish man – a man he lives with throughout the book (and with whom he adopts a child). Sully falls in love with, and marries, a quite ‘unsuitable’ Indian girl in the States. Their mother, Amma, feels let down by both of them… The girls, Mae and Lena, coming from a good family are expected to be trophy wives in Lahore… but they both revolt. They leave Lahore and have careers. They also have disastrous marriages. The reader is left in little doubt that the reason for the scattering of the children is their controlling and thoroughly unpleasant mother who both browbeat and beat them physically into being ‘good children’. Their father, Abbu, is a perfectly pleasing but ineffective player in the novel.

The four children come together and back to Lahore twice in the course of the book – the first time for the funeral of their father, and the second time for the funeral of their mother. Lives have moved on and ‘what might have beens’ are discussed.

The book is excellent in the way it studies the way in which Indian children from a strict family background struggle with, and adjust to, living either overseas with all the inevitable cultural influences and challenges – or, in the case of the girls, simply in the modern world. It goes on to look at the lives of their children, and their children’s children, and how totally different these are to where their parents and grandparents came from. It is a generational book of impact.

It is a book very much in the mould of The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri or A God in Every Stone by Khamila Shamsie. There is a generation of very powerful Asian women writers who easily straddle both Eastern and Western cultures to great effect.

The Good Children is a thought provoking book that examines the impact on people of travel and living in an alternative culture – but still with inevitable ties to where they came from. The theme is one that is bound to become more and more significant as travel and relocation, for both work and play, becomes the norm of modern living. It is a book I thoroughly enjoyed, and have thought about quite a lot since putting it down.

Tony for the TripFiction team

Do drop by and connect with the Team at TripFiction via social media: Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest and when we have some interesting photos we can sometimes be found over on Instagram too.

Subscribe to future blog posts