The If Game
Catherine Storr died in January 2001 aged eighty-seven, and this posthumous children's novel is published over sixty years after her first. Like her most famous book, Marianne Dreams, it blends the supernatural with social and psychological realism. Stephen, aged twelve, lives with his caring but uncommunicative father, but knows nothing of his absent mother, not even whether she is alive or dead. Aided by old keys he has discovered, Stephen finds he can open doors into another life he might be living, if it had been nudged in a slightly different direction. Suppose that instead of staying with his father, he had emigrated to Australia with his mother's family, as they wanted him to... In consequence of these experiences, he finds out the truth about his mother. She is not dead, but in prison for the manslaughter of his abusive stepfather at a time when he had begun to threaten Stephen himself, as an infant. Stephen's own reactions to this traumatic discovery are entirely convincing, and the book ends well with their first and critical reunion after her release. But the attitude of adults to his mother's crime, if such it is, reflects a public severity and family shame which nowadays seem inappr-opriately harsh, and perhaps Catherine Storr, still at her great age so alert to modern times, was in this respect a bit behind them. The story is intriguing, the writing a little flat and dull, though there are many reminders of Storr at her distinguished best.