JENNIFER LASH'S POSTHUMOUS sixth novel, Blood Ties, is a very elegant piece of work dense with detail, minutely observed and with flights of beautiful writing.  Underneath, the plot is often contrived, cliche-ridden and even absurd, but Lash exercises superb control in her determination to flesh out her characters and make you believe in them.

          Violet and Cecil Farr are a monumentally ill-matched couple, living together in a rather grand house in rural Ireland.  Violet is the domineering daughter of a famous literary father, Lumsden Fitzpatrick.  Cecil is a weedy, tweedy loser, irresistibly
drawn to Violet's strength.

          This awful pair (in the typically doomed manner of the Anglo-Irish) produce a doomed child, thus handing down their awfulness to subsequent generations.  Lash knows this is improbable, and yet goes to elaborate lengths to make necessary sex possible.  Violet manages by lying in the furze with her dog, Birken (named Lady C's lover), and getting turned on by the elemental throb of nature.  Cecil merely fantasises about the pert bottom of the paperboy.

            When their son appears, Violet christens him Lumsden, hoping he will be a copy of her celebrated father:  'some poised and perfect vessel into which surely some small flame of mind and spirit would grow with courage and certainty towards a distinguished manhood.'  But of course, the pair of them ruin the boy.  Violet, infuriated by her failure to mould him into what she wants, frightens away any lingering decency.  An English prep school completes his destruction; to survive its misery, he decides to be as wicked as possible, and grows up into a thorough bad 'un.  The local people mutter knowingly about 'changeling' children being born at the big house, as revenge for stealing the land.  Violet feels 'enormous distaste and irritation for the gross, vulgar power of gods and Myth and Dogma over the lives and minds of simple people,' but is obviously in sorest need of some decent gods of her own.

          Through her pride, obstinacy and unconcealed distaste for him, Violet drives Lumsden out of Ireland.  'Both would seek a kind of death to what had been a kind of longing,' writes Lash.  'The longing for a mother to be recognised and cherished by her son and the longing for a son to be wanted and loved, simply for himself.'

          Lumsden's wickedness never quite gets off the drawing board, but his savage, obsessive relationship with Violet is the driving force of this novel.  It concerns the bonds of blood, and the people bound together against their wills.  Not surprisingly, when Lumsden produces an unwanted son of his own, he posts the poor child straight back to his mother.

          Spencer's childhood is a heartbreaking, isolated and emotionally crippled affair.  There is no hope for him -- we have already taken on a tour of his mother's equally hopeless childhood.  Dolly is a baker's daughter, with a mother in a mental hospital, a tarty aunt, and a father who never speaks.  Thrown out of home for getting laid, Dolly ends up as a barmaid at Lumsden's London local, the Spencer Arms.  The pair of them might as well have 'doomed' written across their foreheads.  Eventually, however, their union leads to a kind of redemption.

          Sometimes, you feel Lash has assembled her characters from a kit.  But this is more than compensated for by her lush, delicious prose; always a deep pleasure to read.
 

                     -------------Kate Saunders