[In the following review, Dalley asserts that The Battle for Christabel is more of a case-study than a novel, and applauds the impact of the work.]

Isobel, the narrator of Margaret Forster's new novel, The Battle for Christabel, has a problem. Her closest and dottiest friend, Rowena, although without job, husband, and anything that convention or good sense dictates, decides to have a baby. For such an ineffectual character, she organizes it rather carefully, choosing for the father a man who is sure to absent himself, who will never know about the child, and—this for reasons of her own sexual preference—who is black. Isobel's pleas, threats and dire warnings make no difference, and she herself becomes intimately involved, from the moment when she measures the drops of pregnancy-testing solution into a test-tube, to the day, some six years later, when she stands as sole witness at Rowena's cremation.

After Rowena's death, it become clear that she has made no guardianship arrangements for Christabel. The little girl's grandmother, a redoubtable ex-magistrate of the Edinburgh bourgeoisie, now aged seventy-five and living in old people's sheltered housing, cannot take on the child. Rowena's sister, Camilla, a widow whose own daughter has grown up and left home, has built up a flourishing international career as a flautist.

It is Isobel whom Rowena had repeatedly asked to take on the child, if anything happened—but even before the child's conception Isobel always and emphatically said no. She is single, and likes it that way; her job as an interpreter involves travel and irregular hours; she has positively rejected motherhood for herself. Is she to give up everything in her own life, just for her friend's whimsical piece of breeding?

What Margaret Forster has set out here is a genuine old-fashioned, moral dilemma of duty and pity at war with self-preservation. It is constructed with a deft touch, the details honed to fashion a jousting-ground for the forces of class, race, family, loyalty and all the other issues. What happens (Forster tells us the end at the beginning, so as to interest us in the process rather than the outcome) is that Christabel's aunt and grandmother decide to have her adopted, their dream being some nice middle-class family whom they could visit when they chose. The ensuing bureaucratic charivari of social workers, foster-mothers, prospective adoptive families is as full of savage ironies as one might expect. The other thing one might expect (in fiction, if not in life) also happens: Isobel grows to love Christabel and wants to adopt her, aided by the dependable, lovable Fergus. They marry, they fight for Christabel, and they lose—the court awards her to a mixed-race couple who have never even met the child.

Motherhood, in this book, is taken out, held up to the light and given a vigorous shaking. There was scatty Rowena, as greedy for a baby as a child for a special toy, but licensed for all because she was a natural, a “real” mother. There is Betty, the foster-mother whose tasteless home and ghastly grammar immediately alienate her from Rowena's family (and the reader); her husband is unemployed, and in a sense she “sells” mothering, her only commodity. She also gives sad and deserted children devoted care, even love. And there are Rowena's mother and aunt, who were mothers but didn't like it. Betty's view of these women—that she would rather live in a cardboard box than give away her own granddaughter or niece—evokes not only emotional but class reflections: is their attitude to mothering something to do with the fact that these women are flautists and interpreters, not housewives?

Questions like these are made to sound throughout this intelligent and well-made book. But it is hardly a novel at all. Margaret Forster is so fair, so thoughtful, so thorough, that it seems as if she has had deliberately to introduce some bias (caricatured social workers, cultural snobbery, irrational emotions all round) in order to save any sense of a story: her narrative is always perilously close to a case-study. Its themes and issues protrude spikily through the thinnish fictional upholstery, but—novel or not—it is a book with impact. As well as proving that the law is an ass and prevailing mores a worse beast, it will have most parents checking their wills before a hundred pages are up.