“A NEW HOME, A NEW LIFE, A NEW NAME”
- Book: The Midwife
- Location: London, Wiltshire
- Author: Victoria Jenkins
This is one of those psychological thrillers which has so many twists and turns in its plotline, you need to have your wits about you at all times! At one point, when I had, out of necessity, needed to take a break from my reading, I even anticipated having to go back to the beginning and re-read the story to date, as I was certain I was missing out on something fundamentally important. However, after piecing events together and arranging them in context with both each other and their relevant characters, all gradually became clear, especially if you remember that no one is who you think they are and nothing is as it seems… Let me try and explain!
…
Lauren, a PA, lives alone in a small flat in London. Her brave decision and tenacity in pursuing and persisting with IVF treatment, means that she is now an older, expectant, single mother, who, as her delivery date approaches, is feeling more isolated and lonely by the day, following the break-up of her relationship with partner Callum.
But, for the last twenty years Lauren has been lying to everyone, keeping a secret she can never let out into the cruel light of day, and she is obviously in hiding from someone. So, when first her flat is attacked, then she personally is threatened, she begins to panic, especially when she realises that she is being watched, which means that she has been running from a past which is about to catch up with her. Everyone is a potential suspect in Lauren’s eyes, even her landlord Karim, although she is forced to accept his seemingly guileless, kind gestures, as she has nowhere else to run and no one else to turn to.
Knowing that it is probably only a matter of time before she is ‘outed’ to the world, Lauren decides to try and make contact with her estranged brother Jamie, who has spent the majority of his adult life in prison and is a drug addict. However, Jamie definitely doesn’t want to build any bridges with his sister and in fact, their one and only meeting results in the worst possible ending for him, although Lauren is not yet aware of the guilt she is about to feel when his true fate is revealed.
Alarm bells should have been ringing loud and clear when out of the blue, Lauren is approached by Jackie, an off-duty midwife, who offers her some much needed support and reassurance, even though the two have never met before at any of Lauren’s many ante-natal appointments. Lauren’s suspicions are still only mildly aroused when Jackie invites her to a weekly informal get together away from the confines of the hospital, where she discovers that there are only two participants, herself and another much younger mum-to-be, called Amber, who seems vaguely familiar.
Jackie also has a secret, in fact, it transpires, more than one and she is fast running out of options to keep all her plates spinning at the same time, knowing that if any one of them hits the ground, the consequences will be inconceivably dire for all concerned. When push comes to shove however and Lauren’s baby is in danger of becoming another statistic, will Jackie’s true commitment to her profession outweigh all else, including fears for her own safety and the repercussions her actions may have on others?
When the dust has finally settled, there still aren’t any overtly happy endings, although one or two seeds of hope for the future are shooting towards the light.
But, be sure the sins of the past will always find you out!
…
Whilst this isn’t strictly speaking a dual timeline story, as it is predominantly set in the present day, there are some moving and disturbing flashbacks to 1995, where it all began. The chapters are short, well signposted and easy to navigate, being narrated alternately through the voices of The Mother and The Midwife, which keeps the well constructed, multi-layered and textured storyline, bowling along at a good pace and with the continuity never compromised. The secrets are fed into the narrative and dialogue, one agonising drip at a time, drawing out and ratcheting up the suspense and tension almost to breaking point. Just when I thought I had worked out the two separate strands to the story another curved ball was thrown into the mix, with that eventual dovetailing not finally happening until almost the final agonising page.
Author Victoria Jenkins certainly isn’t afraid to throw some controversial behaviours and crimes into the mix of a plot, being quite prepared to hold them up for inspection and conversation, particularly brave in today’s climate of what is considered to be socially acceptable. Attempting to conceal and cover-up a teenage pregnancy. The coercive behaviour and dogged tenets of a dictatorial parent. The emotional trauma and lasting scars of losing ones parents at a young age and in particularly tragic circumstances. The dogged behaviour and entrapment tactics employed by a detective, who is doing all the wrong things for all the right reasons. At what point, in any of those scenarios, terrible as they are, is taking the law into your own hands and meting out your own brand of justice ever permissible or justified?
Victoria has set up one heck of an emotional, compulsive reading, roller-coaster ride for Lauren and indeed Jackie, with one of them having no idea who her unknown adversary might be, whilst the other has divided loyalties which will threaten to destroy her professional integrity and bend her faith in someone she holds dear, beyond breaking point. Throw into the mix someone whose life is a complete train wreck, dominated only by the lust for revenge and retribution, to the point where reality has almost ceased to exist and you can imagine what kind of a journey you are letting yourself in for. In fact, in this relatively small cast, the characters are all well defined and developed, even though they are all to a person, volatile, complex emotional wrecks. This makes none of them authentic, genuine or reliable and at times it seemed as though I was wading through treacle, trying to shake off the doom and gloom of their combined dour, lugubrious and tenuous hold on reality.
This story was predominantly all about the characters, their relationships to one another and the events which have drawn them together, so location was never really going to be a dominating factor. However, on a purely personal note, the armchair traveller in me was more than satisfied on this occasion, as although most of the action takes place in London, there are references a plenty to past times, when the characters were growing up in the small Wiltshire village of Purton and its nearest neighbouring town of Swindon, which is where I was born and spent almost three decades of my life. I was teased by a real sense of time and place that I could almost step into and an atmosphere which lingered long after I had closed the final page (or at least until my next monthly visit ‘home’).
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