Ghost Children

Ghost Children by Sue Townsend

Sue Townsend is probably my literary hero. The universe more or less conspired against her becoming (and being) a writer. She grew up on a housing estate in Leicester and couldn’t read until she was eight.

She was a single mother to three children by her early twenties. Yet, she became the biggest-selling English writer of the 1980s. She kept writing throughout her life — even after she went blind — and produced an impressive body of work that will long live on.

Townsend’s best known for her Adrian Mole character, particularly by way of his first two diaries, which satirise both the self-absorbed teenager and 1980s life in England under Thatcher. The Mole books continued into the late 2000s — and Townsend was writing another one when she died in 2014. But her collected works consist of much more than the diaries.

Ghost Children is an example of the power of Townsend’s writing beyond Adrian Mole. Many people call Townsend a “comic” writer — and she’s as funny as any I’ve read. But that label is something of a disservice to the depth and breadth of Townsend’s talents and output.

Ghost Children is an example of Townsend’s range. It’s funny — at times — but humour is only ever a temporary, and not always a satisfying, relief from the overall bleakness of this book.

The bleakness is omnipresent. Ghost Children is about abortion, so that’s not entirely unexpected, but it’s more layered than that. The bleakness transcends the subject matter; there’s an existential suffering that pervades everything. It shadows the characters when they’re out walking, selling package holidays, dining at grotty cafes and visiting children in the hospital. Their suffering is multi-faceted, it’s entrenched in their everyday lives and its woven into the fabric of their souls.

Given the depths of this suffering, it’s perhaps not surprising that the bleakness is unrelenting. Not everything is resolved in the end — not really. Ghost Children‘s ending is not entirely satisfying; nor could it be, I suspect, given the landscape of the story and its characters. But it’s more satisfying than a fairytale happy ending; that would have been contrived and unconvincing. Too much happens throughout the book (and in the characters’ pasts) for everything to be tied together neatly with a smile and a kiss.

Somehow, despite the pain and the suffering, this book is beautiful. There’s something so damn thought-provoking and emotionally stimulating about the way Ghost Children is written that makes it compelling reading.

Townsend’s “comic” writing is not always entirely “fun” — but this is on another level. Ghost Children is Townsend at her bleakest, but as a writer, an uncompromising one at that, it’s Townsend at her most powerful.

This book will not be for everyone. It’s not a comfort read. But if you’re after a challenge — emotionally and spiritually — I highly recommend this.