Going Home

by Tom Lamont

Sceptre, £16.99

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What are we duty-bound to do? And what happens to us when we are forced to assume the roles we have tried our best to avoid? These are the questions at the heart of journalist Tom Lamont’s debut, Going Home, which begins with Téo Erskine, pulled by a sense of nagging obligation, returning from his Aldgate flat to the family home in Enfield to spend time with his ailing father. Yet he ends up staying a little longer than he had planned when Lia Woods, his childhood friend, asks him to look after her toddler, Joel, before promptly dying.

Téo soon finds himself trapped at home between father Vic, a cantankerous Scot wasting away with a “surname disease”, and Joel, a bouncing boy who reminds him of the woman he had always loved. “Joel was Lia repeated,” Téo thinks. “He was Lia again.”

As his father declines, his adoptive child blossom. Their lives run in parallel: one loses motor skills while the other gains them.

Around the corner is Téo’s childhood best friend Ben Mossam, a rich, vain and conceited idler. Yet Joel’s appearance appears to unlock within him a latent desire to contribute something to society. The two men act as a foil to each other – “Téo with his caution allied to Ben with his pure flair” – and then, later, begin to function as an old couple, bickering over how to raise the boy they have been stuck with. The narrative keeps switching perspective: from Téo, to Vic, to Ben, to Sibyl, a newly appointed rabbi determined to drag the community’s “half-in, half-out” Jews back to shul.

Central to Lamont’s novel is the significance of duty. Children and old men need help, enmeshing those young and fit enough to provide it within a web of obligation. Judaism, conveniently, provides a clear framework for such a life. As Sibyl observes at one point: “By adhering to the rules of this religion she could live with other people foremost in mind.”

Lamont is a sharp observer of suburban ritual, with an ear for a good phrase. He writes of cars manoeuvring “courtly as dance partners,” and older Enfield buildings, “admired as though they were the rings inside trees, firm proof of existence”.

At one point, he seems to reference Saul Bellow, describing crabs “making slow drugged pleas for clemency against a fishmonger’s window”, just as in Herzog that other chronicler of strained relationships referenced lobsters in a shopfront, “crowded to the glass, feelers bent”. Life and death conjoined in ice.

What lets the book down, though, is its slightly mawkish plot and arguably predictable characters. Minus one stick-the-knife-in twist towards the end, Téo, Ben and co seem to act exactly as one might expect in such circumstances. As the novel moved towards its conclusion and the decision as to who would care for Joel, I felt little investment in the outcome. The moral lesson – that by serving others we might fully develop ourselves – felt a little pat.

Lamont, a fine chronicler of modern Britain via his newspaper reportage, clearly has promise as a novelist. I hope we might soon see him develop it further.