Consider the family

why aren't there more of them?

Here we are on our hike across Sequel Country – thanks for joining me again. Here in the UK it’s Mothering Sunday, so I thought it would be nice and topical to explore the little-visited underground caverns of family relationships in literature.

You see, for some years I’ve been noticing how absent from novels family relationships are. I’m not saying they’re completely absent, of course, just how much less prominent they are than you would expect. Our relationships with our parents, and to some extent with our siblings, help shape who we are in adult life. Yet these formative years rarely seem to be explored in adult novels. From my reading (which I’m prepared to accept might not be representative), most protagonists are in their twenties or thirties, probably because these are the most interesting years in terms of setting a course in life, having life-changing experiences and forming romantic relationships. But this is also a time of life when for most people, one or both parents are still around, and yet I don’t recall ever having read a novel in which the protagonist stopped what they’re doing for a weekend and went to visit their mother for Mothering Sunday.

a mother taking a selfie with her family at the celebration of Holi

This seems like a puzzling omission for contemporary novels which are aiming for realism, and perhaps even more surprising for literary fiction, which tends to be more character-based than plot-based. The only example I can think of off the top of my head is The Remains of the Day, where the protagonist’s relationship with his now-dead father is central.

I’m a fan of Ursula Le Guin’s “carrier bag” theory of fiction, in which she proposes that books, and people, are gatherers of significant things:

A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

Surely most interesting protagonists must have had at least some significant moments with their parents, which would have a bearing on their character, but it seems to me in most novels they never get a mention. I wondered why this is, and I can think of three broad reasons (which overlap with each other somewhat).

1. In a plot-centric novel, nothing that isn’t relevant to the plot is mentioned, so the protagonist’s family get erased. And yet, we do usually seem to get some detail about the protagonist, some back story, some insight into his/her character. I recently read a crime-thriller (not my usual sort of thing) and we still saw some of the protagonist’s home life, how he handles his relationship with his girlfriend (and the things he refuses to handle), giving clues about his own personality. But no mention of his family, or hers, or what they both think about him.

2. Novels can’t be about everything. The world is very complicated, and different kinds of social issues intersect, but a novel has themes and is allowed to not look at every issue in society and just focus on one set of things. That’s part of the convention of what a novel is, and given that there’s an almost endless supply of novels about different things, I’m fine with that (except I would one day like to read a novel with a protagonist like me, as I mentioned in What is a novel).

3. Editing. Having self-edited my own novel Parallel Lines, I now understand much better that everything that doesn’t have a direct bearing on plot or character has to go. Every sentence or paragraph or scene that diverts the reader onto a branch line, that goes down a dead end and is never developed further, has to be deleted, to make the novel readable and well-paced. Perhaps this is why so few family members appear: a dysfunctional family may well have important influences on the protagonist, but a normal family might not.

In LGBT literature, there is a get-out from people’s families being part of the story, in that LGBT people are often on frosty terms with their family (such as in Rainbow Milk, which I quoted from in my column on dialect, where the protagonist’s family are religious and he runs off to London; or in Box Hill in which the main characters deliberately distance themselves from families who wouldn’t approve of their relationship. Yet sometimes parents do appear, such as in Tales of the City (which I discussed in Sequel Examples) in which Michael’s parents visit him, and as well as being a set-up for a moment of embarrassment when someone recognises him from a jockey shorts contest, the scene shows his relationship with them and the difficulty of coming out to parents from Florida. I think the novel is much the better for it.

Since Parallel Lines has episodes in which both protagonists have to live with their parents for short periods as adults (by no means an unusual situation, in my experience, yet vanishingly rare in literature), their relationships with their parents and siblings are relevant. Although I had to cut these aspects down a little for reasons of pace, I left in one scene where each protagonist is alone with each parent so that we see what kind of relationship they have through their dialogue, and I’m proud to have included these in the interests of writing a genuinely realistic novel.

What does this have to do with sequels? Clearly if a character has parents in the first book, they can’t go without a mention in the second, and if they appear for the first time in the second, you’d need a really good justification why they were absent from the first. So it’s a good idea to include parents and siblings in each main character’s back-story and think about those relationships and how they work. Unless the character is an orphan (which is surprisingly common in literature, especially in the fantasy genre for some reason) or late in life themself, then they are likely to have a parental relationship. And if the character is LGBT, that relationship is likely to unusual enough to be worth a mention.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel – that concludes this week’s visit, if you’re enjoying Sequel Country please share it with your friends (or if you’re not enjoying it, share it with your enemies obviously) – either way, please share, it’s how social media works!