Peter Prince's admirable novel, The Good Father, is about a group of professional-class people in the London Borough of Lambeth, trying to see themselves as liberal and left-wing. They were students together in the late 1960s and are struggling to maintain in the 1980s the package of liberal values (or 'received ideas') which they shared so confidently in their youth. The trouble with such package deals is that when one item loses its authority the believer may throw out the whole lot, bag and baggage, baby and bathwater: he may rush to the opposite extreme, seeking out illiberal values to embrace with a fervour that embarrasses old conservatives. Bill Hooper, the hero of The Good Father, was once an excessively keen feminist: now, in his thirties, separated from his wife and denied custody of their four-year-old son, he becomes a fighter for men's rights - and rather a dirty fighter, unchivalrous, ungentlemanly.

LRB 20 October 1983 | PDF Download