[In the following review, Reading offers a favorable evaluation of Family Planning.]

Frank Baldwin has retired from his job as site-manager for a construction company after years of occupational globe-trotting. He and his wife Brenda are flying home from his last assignment in Algiers to their neglected property on the Lancashire coast, where they intend to settle. With them is their son Raymond. But something is amiss. “Smiling and as if addressing a tiny child, she held a finger over her lips in the direction of this hefty young man her eldest son.” Raymond is a maniac.

Tim Parks's ironically titled new novel Family Planning, as well as demonstrating the futility and wrong-headedness of complacent expectation, nags at the conscience concerning responsibility—of the individual, the family and the State. As the plot unfolds (straightforward narrative alternates with miscellaneous epistles), the development of Raymond's malady is traced from his bright boyhood and adolescence to his present unmanageably violent, schizophrenic condition. He seems to be a text-book Freudian Oedipal case—a mum's boy in mum's bed when the execrable Frank (whose solution to any problem has always been to skedaddle from it) first deserted his family to work abroad. But Parks does not dabble in pretentious psychological speculation. It soon becomes apparent, as the Baldwins’ other grown-up children, Garry, Graham and Lorna enter the arena, that the entire family, in some way, shares the father's inability to accept and face up to fate's vicissitudes. Even Raymond, in embracing lunacy (and, concurrently, Islam), may be attempting a retreat from undesirable reality. And the heretofore indomitable Brenda chooses dumb-struck inertia rather than acknowledge the atrocities to which she is subjected as, with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, the gruesome tribulations of the House of Baldwin are fulfilled.

That it all seems so uncontrollable yet bound to happen is what makes the story compelling. At one point a character steps aside, like a chorus in parabasis, to remark that “the problem with novels about loonies was that it just seemed a gimmick to get everybody biting their nails waiting for some awful act of Sunday People violence to happen. It was corny.” Parks himself avoids corniness in his nail-biting narration. He also manages to be funny, compassionate, frightening and precisely observant. The glimpses he gives us of Garry's amorous entanglements in a London bed-sit, Graham's travails at the Leeds Access Insurance Company and Lorna's husband Fred's thwarted attempts at an impeccably planned career in academe are neat little social satires. The characters are sympathetically treated—whether or not they accept the burden of their hapless kinsman (who, despite the fleeting attentions of the terrifyingly credible-sounding “Green Trees” institution, remains irretrievably, magnificently crackers).

It is the implicit ethical issue, though, which is most forceful:

Don't get obsessed with plans. … Don't bank everything on some job or contract or piece of property or prestige. … Remember that at any moment anything may happen. To anyone. … Be ready to write things off. … We are all headed for emptiness one way or another. But just because a person has been transformed in this way I still believe we have some sort of a duty to them. …

Against which humane and sensible sentiments are set the intransigent realities of the NHS:

They come all this crap about community therapy and it being better for him to be in the family, but it's all economics in the end. The only person in the country who doesn't want him in a home is the Chancellor of the bloody Exchequer. Until he goes and kills somebody and then they'll all pretend how shocked they are before letting him out again in a couple of years’ time so he can do it all over again.