Crumbling under the cure
Frank Egerton INCONCEIVABLE by Ben Elton
Bantam, £15.99, pp. 272
This novel about infertility may have faults, but it proves a radical new departure for Ben Elton. One might have expected political rants about NHS waiting-lists or the after-effects of pollution on the nation's sperm count. However, Elton is much more interested in how IVF affects his characters personally.
Sam and Lucy Bell's story is told through their diaries which are designed, according to 'an Oprah', to help them feel 'less like corks bobbing about on a sea of fate'. He is a commissioning editor with the BBC; she works as an assistant at a theatrical agency. Despite their media backgrounds, they are clearly intended to seem like ordinary 'bor- ing old marrieds'. Sam is approaching 40 and is fed up. He would dearly like to write a film script but cannot think of anything to say. Lucy is younger, more assertive in the home, but without much power at the office. Her dream is of having a baby.
She becomes obsessed: well-meaning friends taunt her with their urban myths (about 'women who tried continually and energetically for seven years and then — bang! — out popped triplets'); ludicrous New Age remedies beckon (Imagine a cool forest'); finally, there is only the cold hand of science.
The treatment's effect on each partner is harrowing. 'Sex on demand' destroys Sam's self-esteem while Lucy has to undergo masses of 'demeaning and dehumanizing' tests. When still nothing happens she resents his puny anxieties about the 'tad- pole department'. Soon, the opportunity of an affair with a Byronic-looking actor is threatening to break up the marriage.
All good, powerful stuff, but the novel does take a fair while to settle down. The first half is like a variety show. Sensitive writing still has to compete with farce, motor-mouth comedy and slapstick humour. At times Lucy seems wasted at the agency; she ought to head for Edinburgh. Her stand-up routines convey generalised medical horrors but add little about her real character. Two sequences — a bonk above a ley tine on Primrose Hill and an embarrassing debacle for Sam at the BBC — will no doubt be hilarious when
the film version (Maybe Baby) is released, but are dismal in print.
Then, suddenly, it is as if the old Ben Elton never existed. The 'knob gags' and endless feeble euphemisms for masturba- tion disappear and he is writing a tender, beautifully balanced romantic comedy. Sam and Lucy's story becomes genuinely mov- ing. The diary form is used more effectively to point up ironies and heighten suspense. A clever plot development enables Elton to debate ideas without burdening the nar- rative. He discusses the morality of writing about such a private subject — a personal dilemma because he and his wife have suc- cessfully gone through IVF themselves — and the question of whether fertility treat- ment is an indulgence given that 'three- quarters of the world is starving'.
At its best, Inconceivable is a fine, mature novel about a poignant subject. As one character remarks sadly, 'Everybody knows somebody who's doing it.'
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