Dear Sir
Sarah Bundey’s piece in the March 1994 issue of the Newsletter on genetics and literature set me puzzling. Modern novels which explicitly use genetic plotlines are surprisingly uncommon, when you consider that sex, fertility and family tensions and inheritances are such stock ingredients of fiction. I wonder if that is because science fiction is a marginalised, derided genre in English literature, whereas it has a sturdier presence in cinema: Boys from Brazil and Jurassic Park being a couple of examples.
The only recent novel I can call to mind is Helen Flint’s Return Journey (Heinemann 1987 & Black Swan pb 1988), which won the Betty Trask award. The narrator, Jane, has been married one week. She’s escorting her grotesquely handicapped mother back from Canada to an English nursing home: “My mother had been issued with a one-way ticket to Hell; she never travels alone.” The flight over is the framework for a series of flashbacks to their life together. The condition appears to be an autosomal dominant, late onset, neuromuscular disorder, but “there is nothing fatal, nothing merciful about her illness. She is terminally ill without hope of a terminus.” It was in the Canadian small town of Trois Pistoles that Jane learned that she would inherit this condition. “Only the future was always loaded and now it was cocked and turned towards me.”
Graham Sutton
Wakefield Healthcare