[In the following mixed review, Rodd explores the dominant themes of Shadow Baby.]

The most persistent theme in Margaret Forster's fiction is family relationships, in all their difficult, idiosyncratic ordinariness. In Hidden Lives, the engrossing memoir-cum-biography she published last year, she traced the maternal line of her own family back to turn-of-the century northern England, using personal recollection, anecdote and dogged detective work to piece together a story that was simultaneously commonplace and riveting. In describing her female forebears' lives of poverty, domestic servitude, halting upward mobility and slowly burgeoning opportunity, she was also representing the twentieth-century experience of anonymous millions. The dramatic highlight of the book, however, centred on Forster's grandmother, who, it emerged, had given birth to a daughter some years before she met and married a gentle and prospering Carlisle butcher. Though he apparently knew and wanted to help the child, his wife always refused to acknowledge her existence. On the day of the grandmother's funeral, this rejected daughter, by now middle-aged, made a distraught and ugly appearance on the doorstep, demanding her birthright. Turned away by Forster's incredulous mother and aunts, she never reappeared.

In the reconstruction of these events, you could positively feel the author's novelistic nerves twitching. She speculated about her grandmother's motives and about the psychological price to both mother and child of this act of gross denial, but the episode remained essentially mysterious. In Shadow Baby, Forster exploits the freedoms of fiction to explore, with her habitual combination of cool sociological overview and richly engaged detail, some of the issues raised by that intriguing fragment of family history.

Shadow Baby consists of two alternating and apparently unconnected third-person narratives, both featuring young women and their illegitimate daughters. Like Forster's grandmother, Leah is a working-class, parentless Carlisle girl who gives birth to a child in the 1880s. Hazel is a middle-class suburban seventeen-year-old who becomes pregnant in the 1950s. Though abandoned by the baby's father—an archetypal young toff with the exquisite name of Hugo Todhunter—Leah keeps little Evie, leaving her to the care of an elderly relation only when, four years later, she marries a modestly successful local tailor. Hazel, whose pregnancy is the result of a moment of idle sexual curiosity, is bundled abroad by her mother to have her baby in secret. The child is immediately given up for adoption, while Hazel returns to embark on the tidy life—university, career, marriage and family—that she and her mother had always envisaged. Evie never stops yearning for the mother she cannot even remember, while Hazel's daughter, Shona, is a self-possessed school-leaver before she learns that she is adopted. Both girls become obsessed to the point of instability with the longing to trace and know their mothers. It is Hazel, finally confronted by the child she had so easily given away, who expresses the heart of the matter: “It all came down to whether being mothered by your actual mother mattered … no, it all came down to whether being rejected by her when you had found her at last mattered.”

Hazel's no-nonsense tone mirrors Margaret Forster's own approach to her material. This is not to deny either the novel's narrative generosity—it is full of incident, dialogue and, especially in the Carlisle episodes, an acute sense of time and place—or its shamelessly mawkish strain. The portrait of the waifish Evie—consigned to a grim orphanage when her aged carer dies, clutching the two ribbons and scrap of paper which are her mother's only legacy, treated as a skivvy by the distant cousins who grudgingly rescue her, and all the while remaining docile, clean and scrupulously honest—stretches belief even as it brings an enjoyable lump to the throat. Yet elsewhere Forster is briskly unsentimental. Nowhere is there the kind of joyously tearful parent-child reunion beloved of popular journalism. When Shona bursts into her mother's orderly life, it is an act almost of aggression.

Shona at least has the opportunity to confront her mother and exorcize her rage. Leah refuses to meet her bastard child. It is her decent if bemused husband, Henry, who ensures that Evie has a job and somewhere to live, and who attends her wedding. Leah, meanwhile, learning that the grown-up Evie is living near by, becomes a hysterical semi-recluse, dreading every knock on the door. The apprehension may be justified, since the thwarted Evie has by this time become a kind of grim huntress, spectral and alarming.

Superficially at least, Shadow Baby's verdict on illegitimacy, even illegitimacy redeemed by loving adoptive parents, seems less than sanguine. All four main characters are scarred by it, Leah and Evie disastrously so, while the familial link between the two narratives, when it is finally revealed, turns out also to involve an illegitimate birth, the repercussions of which echo negatively through subsequent generations. Of course, it is secrecy and denial that do the real damage, but all the same, in a stroke which contains only a hint of irony, the novel ends with an almost indecently cheerful abortion.

Despite the book's zesty excursions into melodrama, Forster is at heart a bracingly commonsensical writer, with a down-to-earth belief in the explicability of human action, in cause and consequence. Here she is, for example, like George Eliot in unusually brisk mood, explaining precisely how Leah's refusal to agree to her husband's helping little Evie eroded their marriage: “She had outwitted him and prevented him from following his own instincts. He felt how powerful his wife was in all matters emotional and it angered him. But because he was not the sort of man in whom rage could be sustained, this anger melted down into disapproval and this in turn trickled down into feelings of detachment towards Leah.” Yet, where explanation is most needed, the novel is less than convincing.

It is true that Leah eventually offers a reason for having given up her daughter, but her straightforward account seems somehow too simple to justify the extremity and persistence of her torments. It comes besides, only long after the event. Like Henry, the reader had been taken aback when Leah agreed to marry him only on condition that they abandon her child; unlike Henry, we had been privy to Leah's life with the faultless toddler and seen little hint of the revulsion Leah later claims to have felt. It is not that her rejection and subsequent terror of her daughter are necessarily implausible only that, at the pivotal moment of the book—and despite the authorial omniscience she relishes elsewhere—Margaret Forster seems unwilling to venture too deep into those dark and messy regions of human motivation which, at their best, novels—and perhaps only novels—can illuminate.