Milk and Honey

Milk and Honey by Gerald Moore. Edward Gaskell, £16.99, pp 448. ISBN 1 898546 48 7. Rating: ★

There's a novel deep inside most of us. Gerald Moore is a retired doctor who has got round to writing his. I gave it one star, but that should not necessarily put you off, since the interpretation (and enjoyment) of novels has an intensely personal dimension. This book tells a complex story, and there is a great deal of meaning to vie for interpretation within it.

The book is set between the first and second world wars. The title is taken from the politicians' promise—made perhaps more implicitly than explicitly to the survivors of the Great War—of a peaceful land flowing with milk and honey in which they might settle, raise families, and build their dreams. Ernest Parnell is the son of Irish immigrants who settled in Swansea in the late 19th century. He shows an early talent for entrepreneurship, and with the help of a benefactor achieves a good biochemistry degree before volunteering for war. In Flanders, he loses comrades, gains rank, and returns disfigured and traumatised to face convalescence and an uncertain peacetime.

As Moore puts it, Parnell is “a man hardened by trench life but craving a protective womb.” He marries badly (above his station) to Gladys, a priggish, immature, and sexually repressed woman who fills his private life with spite and vitriol. Finding fulfilment in his work as a pharmacist, Parnell builds a successful retail business largely on his instincts for the toiletries with which newly affluent women might wish to pamper themselves. But the Stock Market crash of 1929 leaves his business in ruins. Overnight, Parnell's young family is forced to trade their fashionable home in Manchester Square for a Dickensian hovel in southeast London.

Parnell's return to affluence is cleverly entwined with two key historical events: the emergence of effective antimicrobial drugs (whose commercial potential draws the astute high street chemist beyond quack remedies and toiletries), and England's uneasy trading relationships with an increasingly fascist German regime. The book alludes to the denial of dark political realities by senior officials keen to promote lucrative contracts with the Reich, and to the corruption of British pharmaceutical research talent in the development of chemical weapons.

What didn't I like about the book? Firstly, Moore overuses the flashback technique to such an extent that the chapters read like a shuffled pack of cards. Secondly, his characterisation is overburdened with social, racial, and gender stereotypes, which unwittingly thwart the potential for developing the individual personalities of his characters. And thirdly, I personally found the book's many sex scenes gratuitous, implausible, and occasionally grotesque. Sex is a legitimate literary device that more experienced writers have successfully used to articulate the passion of revolution (try, for example, Roddy Doyle), the psychic tyranny of war (Pat Barker), the emotional desolation of religious repression (Jeanette Winterson), the peril of social liaisons beyond one's caste (Arundhati Roy), and the fragility of the ageing male ego (Mary Wesley). But perhaps it was the Gladys in me whose stomach was churning by the end of Milk and Honey. As I said, you should probably buy the book and judge for yourself.