Ben Faccini has written an unusual and clever novel which reflects the shifting reality of family life today and how unresolved emotional wounds of the past impact the present. As stepfamilies have increasingly become a part of everyday life, more adults find themselves navigating the messy, fragile territory of raising children who aren’t biologically theirs. Other People’s Children is, in turn, touching, amusing, frustrating and profound.
Tommaso works for an international organisation reporting on marginalised children worldwide (doubtless inspired by Faccini’s work for a United Nations agency in Paris) and is often away. His partner, Madeleine is organised and sensible and comes from a stable family background giving her ‘a solid anchoring in the world,’ unlike him. Luc and Seb, her two young sons, aged eight and five, resent his presence as a stepfather.
When they have to move out of their small rented flat because of essential building works being done, they move in to the vast dilapidated mansion flat of Tommaso’s frail ninety-year-old grandmother, Alma, who is slipping into dementia. She is superstitious, frail and increasingly paranoid about a man banging at the door trying to break in (or so she thinks). She lives in a ‘crumbling jungle of a flat where she stashes shoplifted couture dresses and scarves under the beds’ and is full of stories and drama. The boys love her and the ramshackle set up, whereas Madeleine is not at all keen about living in such a dusty place full of mice and a jungle of potted plants dotted about on windowsills covered in dead flies.
The flat has stayed in a time warp since Alma arrived from Italy sixty years previously. Her husband – a survivor of an internment camp in World War Two – had wanted to be an artist but imported wine instead to earn a living. ‘Money is the great boredom of life,’ says Alma. (She certainly has a point, much as it is a necessity!) She had brought up Tommaso after his mother bolted to America never to return, and his father had died when he was only ten years old.
Alma’s mind unravels and she shifts erratically between Italian and English. She pours out long-buried memories of her youth in wartime Italy, recalling the old family house with a cobbled courtyard and stone steps leading up to the door, and the partisans in the hills. She is adamant it was destroyed, that absolutely nothing is left. After a work trip to Geneva, instead of flying home, Tommaso drives south towards Aosta to see if he can find La Rocca, and the old house with a view that he knows so well from his grandmother’s photos; never mind if it is now a pile of old stones. The emotional core of the novel shifts when he discovers Alma’s devastating wartime secret.
Friend or Foe?
The title’s double meaning slowly comes clear as Tommaso struggles to care for ‘other people’s children’ (his stepsons) and a tragic piece of family history emerges about protecting, losing and raising displaced children. The past is never fully buried – not helped by linguistic and cultural barriers.
‘There’s nothing solid, no certainty whatsoever in our lives,’ says Madeleine. Alma’s unhealed wounds from wartime Italy and the UK’s treatment of World War Two Italian immigrants have shaped how Tommaso views family, abandonment and responsibility. Tommaso and Madeleine increasingly struggle to express their real needs to one another. Will their relationship survive?
Caring vs. Caretaking
Faccini draws a painful line between the emotional state of loving and worrying about someone (caring) and the exhausting logistics of physical support (caretaking). At times it feels as though caretaking is Tommaso’s way of coping with overwhelming situations. Trying to keep a collapsing h ousehold and precarious family life afloat is his way of avoiding the reality of Alma’s fading mind and looming death.
He clearly cares about forming a family bond with Madeleine’s two sons, who do not trust him, as he tries to be the father he never had. But his role is generally reduced to the practical side of life, making meals and enforcing discipline, whereas they have fun times with their actual father. The irony in this is that his day job is to care about marginalised children, yet his reports are clinical and bureaucratic; driven by data and statistics.
Other People’s Children beautifully captures the fragility of relationships, the burden of what it means to protect children amidst uncertainty and chaos, and how national and personal histories intertwine across generations. Both contemporary and timeless, it is a bittersweet read.
Photo by Emily Faccini
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