BLOOD WILL OUT
Blood Ties
By Jennifer Lash
375 pp / $24.95 (hardcover)
St. Martin's Press
Review by DARINA MOLLOY
WHAT characterizes Blood Ties most strongly is its almost total lack of sympathetic characters. It's only towards the end of the book that the reader gets to know one of the characters well enough to actually like him, and by that stage his story is almost over anyhow.
This tale of dysfunctional families at their most messed-up would rival anything seen on shows hosted by Jerry Springer or Sally Jesse Raphael. Anglo-Irish couple Cecil and Violet Farr co-habit peacefully enough in their Irish country home, but theirs isn't a normal husband-wife existence. They follow a daily routine, and the arrival of a baby boy ten years into the marriage disrupts things considerably. Little wonder then that Lumsden Farr, detested by his mother and largely ignored by his father (a closet homosexual), should grow up to be the mess that he is. Sent away to school in England, but eventually expelled for lewd activities, and banned from home for similar escapades, he leads a life of grand schemes and hare-brained ideas but with very little realism.
The aristocratic looking Lumsden is patiently adored by a meek little London barmaid whose own mother went mad shortly after giving birth. Dolly is far from equal to Lumsden's silly mind games, so she offers up the one thing she has to give: herself. Inevitably, she soon discovers that she is pregnant and the birth soon after of Spencer Farr drives her almost as insane as her own birth drove her mother. She abuses little Spencer, until he is eventually rescued by her only friend and sent to live with his grandparents in their Irish country manse in the village of Ballynaule. This lunacy, of course, is a case of out of the frying pan, into the fire, but at least Spencer is not physically abused by his grandparents. Instead, he is barely tolerated and rarely spoken to until the wheel comes full circle and he is, like his father years before him, banished to England for a supposed transgression. Once there, Spencer discovers that he is wanted by neither his mother nor his father, and he spends a period of time living rough on the streets. He eventually finds love with a closeknit family who all but adopt him, and for the first time in Blood Ties the reader has the opportunity to look beyond the morose little boy and see the human being beneath.
Blood, of course, will out and one could hardly expect Spencer to fare out well, coming from such a messed-up family. There are no happy endings in Blood Ties, just an appropriate one. A dark tale, but one that is well written. It's also the last chance to sample the work of British writer Jennifer Lash. The mother of actor Ralph Fiennes, Lash died of cancer in 1993.
Rating: two books